Rust's October update in detail: livestock, biofuel and a helipad you have to repair

Cows and sheep

Cows and sheep now live on the island. Both produce dung, cows give milk and sheep give wool, and like any animal they can be harvested for meat, bones and leather. You can capture wild ones and keep them at your base. Like plants they have genes and needs and can be bred for better animals, although the genes do not work exactly the way plant genes do.

Selling animals and wool

A new vendor outside the Stables buys grown cattle and sheep. Lead the animal there and you get a random offer based on its gene quality. You can turn it down twice for a new offer; after the third the vendor refuses to buy that animal for 15 minutes. He also takes wool, up to 400 at a time, with better offers the more you bring in one go.

Milk and cream

Milk can be drunk as it is. Keep it in a fridge for four hours and you can skim it into skimmed milk and cream, a stronger consumable. Both are ingredients in new recipes: milk generally makes tea effects last longer, cream makes them stronger.

Fences and gates

To keep animals where you want them there are new fence and animal gate deployables. With the new navigation system switched on, animals and other NPCs can walk into player buildings and respect doors that open and close, so a pen needs a gate that actually shuts.

Biofuel Generator

The Biofuel Generator turns raw or spoiled meat and other organic matter into low grade fuel. Fill it, stir it by hand and let it work; after about 30 minutes it needs stirring again, and it can signal that through an electrical output. Food with more calories gives more fuel.

Small wildlife

Frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish now appear in the biomes that suit them. They are mostly scenery for now and are tightly budgeted so they cost servers and players as little performance as possible.

The Bandit Camp helipad starts broken

At the start of every wipe the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp is in disrepair and the vendor sells no helicopters. Players repair it by hitting it with a hammer while carrying the required resources, much like building a siege weapon. Once repaired it stays repaired for the whole wipe, for everyone. The aim is fewer helicopters in the first hours of a wipe.

Sandbags stack up

Sandbags now have four stages. Placing another sandbag on top upgrades it to the next, taller stage, ending in a pillbox. All sandbag skins work on every stage. Crafting is cheaper, they stack to 20, and in loot they come in stacks of four.

Locked loot rooms

Following the Power Plant loot room from August, locked rooms were added at Airfield, Ferry Terminal, both Harbours, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment Plant. They open once enough Heavy Fuses are in the Power Plant; harder monuments need more fuses.

Fuses last longer on quiet servers

On low-population servers the power was often off for long stretches, which also shut down the drone marketplace. Heavy Fuses now last four times longer when 10 or fewer players are online, scaling back to normal at 100 players. The small fuse box at the Power Plant was also moved so it can be reached from outside through a broken window.

Smoother grenades, C4 and satchels

Throwing grenades, C4 and satchels used to wait for the server before anything happened, which felt slow on a high ping. Your game now shows the throw immediately and is corrected by the server only if the two disagree.

Also in this update

• The machete has a new model, textures and animations.
• Rust moved to its own render pipeline. Expect slightly better performance now and more later; for the first month it can be switched off under the experimental settings.
• The country picker in the server browser was redesigned.
• All four ladder hatches can now be skinned through the workshop.
• More official Facepunch servers require TPM and Secure Boot.
• A Halloween update follows on 22 October.

Source: Facepunch devblog rust.facepunch.com