Rust Livestock Update Adds Animals, Farming, and More

Rust is back with its annual update. This time, for October, they are focusing a little bit more on the world itself, or rather the lack of wildlife and animals. So this patch, the Livestock update, fleshes out the world with a mix of wildlife and tameable animals.

Livestock & Benifits

Beyond the many smaller animals now running around Rust Island from the trailer, a handful of livestock can now be tamed, bred, and harvested for different materials.

Players can now tame cows and sheep, with cows producing milk and sheep producing wool. You can harvest both for meat, bones, and leather like other animals. Additionally, you can sell a grown animal to an NPC at the ranch if your farm is getting full.

As for what milk is used for, you can drink it just like any other consumable, but if you refrigerate it for 4 hours, you can turn it into skim milk. Doing so will give you Skimmed Milk and Cream. All of these items are in a bunch of crafting recipes. Milk generally increases the duration of Tea effects, whereas Cream increases the potency.

Fencing & Biofuel

You can now also construct small fencing areas to keep your livestock under control, but you’ll naturally want to do that behind sturdy walls, since they offer no protection.

Plus, with this update, there is finally a way to make use of raw or spoiled meat via the Biofuel Generator. This new machine turns organic matter into low-grade fuel, but you must stir it by hand. Simply fill it up, stir it, and let it process for over 30 minutes before you have to touch it again. You can also hook up some IO to let you know when it needs stirring again.

The amount of low grade you get depends on the type of organic matter you put in; those with a higher calorific value will give you more low grade.

Critters & Performance

Alongside the livestock coming in this update, you’ll also see a bunch of smaller animals scuttling around the environment. From squirrels in the forest to crabs on the beach, the world of Rust no longer feels completely devoid of animal life, sparing a few mobs.

The devs know the community will have comments about possible stuttering or performance problems these animals might bring. So they had this to say:

The critters are heavily budgeted and have dedicated behaviours to ensure they don’t take up any more server (and client) performance than strictly necessary. For now, they are mostly set dressing, and their performance limits are set with that in mind.

Thanks to our many efforts to optimise other aspects of the game, we can use a part of those savings to give the game more life and vibrancy!

Air Wolf Raid

But this update isn’t all about animals. At the start of the wipe, the Air Wolf helipad in the Bandit Camp will now be in a state of disrepair. The vehicle vendor NPC will refuse to sell vehicles to anyone until repairs are done.

Ultimately, players must make these repairs, and doing so is like constructing siege weapons. But once the helipad no longer needs fixing, it stays repaired for the duration of the wipe.

The intention is that repairing the helipad requires a communal effort and air vehicles purchased from this vendor should no longer start spawning too quickly into the start of the wipe. If a clan wishes to get quick access to air vehicles they are required to invest a significant amount of resources to do so and they are also opening up access to the vendor to everyone else on the server.

Powergrid Loot Rooms & Heavy Fuse Decay

The last major thing arriving in this update is an expansion of a previous Rust update: the Power Trip patch. They are adding new loot rooms to several other monuments. These rooms are locked by default and will become accessible once enough Heavy Fuses have been put into the Powerplant.

You can find some of these new rooms at the following locations:

• Airfield
• Ferry Terminal
• Harbour 1
• Harbour 2
• Ferry Terminal
• Junkyard
• Launch Site
• Military Tunnels
• Nuclear Missile Silo
• Radtown
• Sewer Branch
• Trainyard
• Water Treatment Plant

Also, heavy fuses and their decay rate will now scale with the server population. If the server has 10 or fewer players, the fuses will last four times as long. This means that smaller servers won’t have to keep as frequent tabs on Power Plant and other monuments as much as larger servers will.