Development on Rust continues across multiple fronts this week, with livestock ranching, character customization, expanded Power Grid loot rooms, and a broad slate of optimizations and fixes all in progress. Most major feature work remains on separate development branches and is not yet on staging.
What changed: Livestock, character customization, and new Power Grid loot rooms advanced on dev branches. Why it matters: These systems add persistent animal husbandry, deeper avatar control, and more monument-based PvE incentives. Who should care: Survival players invested in farming builds, monument raiding, and long-term base progression.
Livestock Ranching
The Livestock system is taking shape on a dedicated development branch. A vendor at the Ranch sells baby animals, which players can lead home using leads. Key components include:
- Hitch & Trough — provides food and water with fluid IO and a storage adaptor for potential automation
- Trust system — animals build trust over time; mothers protect calves; fully trusting bulls can defend owners
- Genetics — first pass underway, impacting cow sell value and sheep traits
Animal fencing has been merged into the livestock branch, with work focused on snapping, placement, collisions, destruction effects, and crafting costs.
Character Customization
Following the player model overhaul earlier this year, character customization now includes hair and skin color selection. The customization screen received new icons, improved lighting, camera fixes, and general polish, plus optimization work on character previews and thumbnails.
Power Grid Loot Rooms
The Player Maintained Monument system is expanding to additional monuments.
| Monument | Loot Room Status |
|---|---|
| Ferry Terminal | Functional |
| Airfield | In progress |
| Harbors | In progress |
Exact unlock requirements are not yet confirmed, but maintaining grid power appears tied to future monument benefits.
Additional Updates
New Sandbag Barricade variants — including a larger Sandbag Pillbox — are in development and will unlock alongside the existing blueprint. The underground train network is gaining randomized rooms with wiring passes. Weapon visual refreshes cover the 8x Scope, Holosight, Handmade Sight, M92 world model, and Nailgun viewmodel animations. A navmesh raycast loop fix that could stall servers has merged, alongside server occlusion and Mac graphics improvements. Notable fixes include vehicle steering wheel code lock changes, Oil Rig scientist hitbox corrections, Honey Bandage additions to Primitive and Hardcore tech trees, and Jungle FPSframerate. How many images (frames) the game shows per second; higher = smoother motion. 60 fps is a common target. drop mitigation testing.
Compared to prior updates, this week’s work signals a shift toward persistent, automatable PvE systems rather than purely combat balance. Expect livestock and customization to remain on dev branches through further iteration, with the next staging merge likely once fencing and genetics pass internal testing.