Rust’s Livestock update puts farming profits on the road.

What a herd produces

Facepunch’s October 1, 2026 Livestock update added cows and sheep with needs, genetics and breeding. Both provide dung; cows produce milk and sheep yield wool. Grown animals can be sold, or harvested for meat, bones and leather. Animal fences and gates help contain them.

Milk becomes skimmable after four hours in a refrigerator, producing skimmed milk and cream. The developer says milk generally extends tea effects while cream increases their potency. Animal genes do not behave exactly like plant genes, so existing plant-breeding methods are not a ready-made livestock recipe.

The vendor can refuse you, too

Lead a grown animal to the Stables vendor for a randomized offer based on gene quality. You can reject an offer twice more; rejecting all three makes the vendor refuse that animal for 15 minutes. Wool uses the same three-offer system, with rewards based on the amount brought in one delivery, up to 400 units.

Our analysis: choose the load before the route

That creates two distinct decisions. Breeding changes what you can offer; delivery size and timing determine how much work you expose outside the base. A larger wool load may improve the vendor’s proposal, but also concentrates more of your production in a single journey. An animal sale additionally requires getting a living asset to the buyer.

The offer limit means haggling has a time cost. It is worth deciding what makes an offer acceptable before transporting a valuable herd member, rather than assuming you can reroll indefinitely. These are implications of the published rules, not a measured profit guide.

Facepunch also describes NPC processing budgets and navigation optimizations. Those are developer claims about the system; we have not benchmarked server performance or established the safest transport method.