Livestock Update - News

This month's update brings a major refresh to farming with the introduction of new Livestock animals, critters, and swimmers. Plus, fresh food recipes, the new Biofuel Generator, an overhaul to Sandbag Barricades, and new Powergrid Lootrooms to plunder. And all the usual bug fixes, improvements, and QoL changes!

01 October 2026

DEVBLOG

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LIVESTOCK

Maverick

This patch we are introducing cows and sheep.

What resources can THEY GIVE?

Both produce dung, cows produce milk, and sheep produce wool.

They can also be harvested for meat, bones and leather like any other animal.

Additionally, you can sell a grown animal to an NPC in the ranch.

How to set up a farm?

There are multiple ways to capture wild livestock, some more efficient than others, but they should all be pretty intuitive.

When the new navmesh is enabled, NPCs can enter player structures and respect doors opening/closing, so the sky is the limit.

Like plants, they have genetics and needs, and can be bred to hunt for a god clone.

However, the genes won't behave exactly like plants, so old techniques may not apply.

WILL IT TANK PERFORMANCE?

Each game frame, only a subset of the NPCs are processed, up to a hardcoded max time per frame.

So when we increase the population, the server doesn't directly lose FPS, instead NPCs just become slower to react because we distribute the load across frames automatically when over budget.

We still spent time multithreading and optimising the new navigation system, at least doubling its performance since the last patch.

As usual, we'll be monitoring server performance and fixing problems as they appear.

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Livestock economy

Jarryd Campi

Growing and caring for your livestock will allow you to access some new resources and rewards.

Grown Cattle and Sheep can be sold at a Stable for a variety of resources. Simply lead your animal to the Stables and speak to the new vendor outside, where you will receive a randomized offer based on the gene quality of the animal. You can reject the offer and get another two more times, at which point the vendor will get annoyed and won't want to buy the animal for 15 minutes.

Wool can be harvested from Sheep and traded in to the same vendor, where you will get up the three offers just like when you sell animals. In this case the rewards offered will be based on how much wool you bring in the one go - the maximum being 400. High risk, high reward.

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Milk

Jarryd Campi

Cows give you access to a new resource - milk. It can be consumed as is, but if you refrigerate it for 4 hours, you will gain a new option to skim the milk. Skimming the milk will give you two items - Skimmed Milk and Cream. Cream is a more powerful consumable.

Milk and Cream can also be used in a variety of crafting recipes. Milk will generally increase the duration of tea effects, while Cream can be used to increase the potency of those effects.

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livestock fencing

Adam W

To help keep your new livestock under control, we've added new animal gate and fence deployables - perfect for keeping your pet animals safe (ish!).

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Biofuel Generator

Ian Henderson

A way to finally make use of raw or spoiled meat. The Biofuel Generator converts organic matter to low grade, but it must be stirred by hand!

You can fill it up, stir it and let it process. It will take around 30~ minutes before you'll have to stir again, but don't worry - you can hook up some IO to let you know it needs stirring even when you're in the next room.

The amount of low grade you're given depends on the type of organic matter you put in, those with a larger calorific value will give you more low grade.

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Critters and Swimmers

ElliotH

Alongside the livestock, we are bringing in some smaller animals to make the world feel more alive! Frogs, Rabbits, Squirrels, Sea turtles, Crabs, and Jellyfish will all be appearing around the island in the biomes that suit them.

Performance

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.

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Air wolf repairable helipad

Martyn Chapman

At the start of the wipe the Air Wolf helipad in Bandit Camp will now be in a state of disrepair. The air vehicle vendor NPC will refuse to sell vehicles to anyone until the helipad is repaired.

Repairing the helipad is a process similar to constructing siege weapons - a certain amount of resources are required and you can transfer resources from your inventory by bashing the helipad with a hammer. Once the helipad is repaired 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.

Server admins can change this behaviour via convars vehicle.padrepairsrequired (if false this change is effectively reverted) and vehicle.setrepairablepads (force helipad into fully disrepaired/repaired state with 0/1)

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sandbag stacking

Adam W

Sandbags have been reworked. They now have four stages, and each stage is upgraded to the next by stacking another sandbag deployable on top. Each stage grows taller, with the final stage being a pillbox version. All Sandbag skins are supported across all variations.

The crating cost of the sandbag deployable has been reduced to account for needing to stack more of them. When found in loot, Sandbag Barricades will now be a stack of 4. We've also increased the total stack size to 20.

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POWERGRID LOOT ROOMS

Damian Lazarski

Building on the Powerplant loot room introduced in the Power Trip update, we’ve added new loot rooms to many other monuments. These rooms are locked by default and become accessible once enough Heavy Fuses have been inserted into the Powerplant to generate the required power. The number of Heavy Fuses needed to unlock each room varies, with more challenging monuments requiring more fuses than beginner-friendly ones.

We won’t spoil the exact locations of these new rooms, but you’ll find them at the following monuments:

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

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population decay scaling of Heavy fuses

Rin

Power phases are intended to fluctuate based on player interaction with the system. This is largely working as we expected on high population servers. However, on servers with lower population, power is often offline for extended periods of time. With the addition of the marketplace needing power to function, this started to lock out basic necessities like trade. To help ease the pain, we’ve made two changes.

Firstly, the decay of heavy fuses will now scale with population. If a server has 10 or less players online, heavy fuses will last four times longer. This gradually scales back to normal values at 100. We’ll continue to monitor this and make adjustments as necessary.

Secondly, we have moved the location of the small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant. It’s now accessible from outside the building via a broken window. This should help keep minimum power phases online.

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Client Predicted Grenades/Explosives

Ian Henderson

Grenades/C4/Satchels in Rust are server-sided. This means when you left-click, your client will tell the server that it has to spawn the grenade or c4, etc and then we have to wait for the server to do so. With higher ping, this can feel like a substantial wait.

We are now introducing some client prediction when you use a grenade/c4/satchel. This means that throwing these items will now feel way smoother (especially on higher pings) as your local client will simulate what will happen on the server before the server has to tell us, but don't worry: if there are any discrepancies, your client will be corrected. This shouldn't happen too often, but it will kick in when it needs to.

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Machete refresh

Alex Webster

This month, another of our old models gets a long-overdue makeover. The new high-quality machete model features high-resolution textures and a new set of animations.

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Country Selection UI Refresh

Ian Henderson

The country selection UI was a bit of a mess when it was first implemented. With it now being a large part of the server browser, we felt it was time to give it its own design and freshen up!

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Performance - Viewmodel memory

Jarryd Campi

We noticed recently that the hands model that forms part of every viewmodel was taking up a surprisingly large amount of memory. Each viewmodel had the same hand mesh included - it was the same mesh but duplicated and bundled with the LR, the Eoka, etc. It wasn't the sort of thing that would have been worth optimising years ago (each one was only 0.9mb) but nowadays we have over 100 viewmodels so it's adding up.

We went back through every viewmodel in the game and removed the mesh, then made one standard hands mesh that gets created as well when you equip a viewmodel.

This required us to improve some of our internal tooling as not having the mesh included in the viewmodel made it difficult to preview and inspect animations in the Unity editor. Optimisations are important, but generally not at the expense of our internal workflows and efficiency.

We removed 133 meshes and saved roughly 100MB of memory in total.

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New Workshop Skinnable: All Ladder Hatches

matt.i

This month’s workshop skinnable is another four items! The Ladder Hatches:

Ladder Hatch
Triangle Ladder Hatch
Armored Ladder Hatch
Armored Triangle Ladder Hatch

This is sure to open up some doors (hatches) to the skinning community! We’ve put in extra effort to make the top and bottom of these hatches unique, so there’s plenty of opportunity to turn your hatch into a delicious pizza.

To make your own Ladder Hatch skins, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Ladder Hatch deployable items listed above. From there, you can download the model files and add your own materials.

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Plague Doctor Hazmat SUIT Item DLC

The Plague Doctor is in town.

The Plague Doctor delivers no cure - only death and decay. Bring out your dead, or prepare to join them.

The Plague Doctor Hazmat Suit can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.

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Performance - Dynamic Store Assets

Daniel P

One area where we could save a bit on memory is our in-game store. We use a lot of different assets to have our store looking great. But when playing the game, you literally can't see them, and yet they're still there either actively hogging up memory or putting pressure on Unity's GPU streaming system. So wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have those assets to worry about when we don't need them?

Over the past month we've been working on reorganizing how our in-game store deals with assets. We've made a couple important changes:

Store now actively loads and unloads textures when relevant UI pages come in to/out of view
These assets are no longer part of the core asset bundles meaning they don't get loaded automatically
Store has been converted to fetch images from our backend infrastructure
If something goes wrong with our image-serving backend, then game will load local assets

You also might see blurred placeholders(done via BlurHash) while fetching fresh images that you don't have cached:

Not only does this allow us to ship content more easily in the future (though there's more work in that direction), but it also saves us RAM:

-250MB compared to last release build when starting the game
~450MB when closing the store menu and letting it unload resources after ~1min

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Performance - Animation IK JObs

octo

We moved all of our inverse kinematics, which are secondary procedural animations like spine or hand movements, to be multithreaded this week. Previously, they were all running one by one for each player at the end of a frame, right after the animations had played.

Other than performance, this actually lets us do a couple of things:

- We can use IK in our new animation subsystems and still keep them multi threaded. Any subsystem can just modify the IK before it runs.

- We have a lot more control over existing IK, we previously relied heavily on built-in IK from Unity.

Faster:

Update: 1.99ms → 1.47ms = -0.52ms~

LateUpdate: 0.98ms → 0.27ms = -0.71ms~

AnimationGraphFinish: 0.99ms → 0.75ms = -0.24ms~

Worse:

DirectorUpdateAnimationBegin: 0.42ms → 0.62ms = +0.20ms~

UpdateIkJobData: 0ms → 0.11ms = +0.11ms~

Overall:

UpdateScene: 9.36ms → 8.29ms = -1.07ms~

Director begin+end: 1.41ms → 1.37ms = -0.04ms~

Performance-wise, the new IK saves us around 1ms of frame time with 100 players in the scene, this will probably be a lot less drastic if you play on a lower-population server and only end up seeing 5-10 players at once.

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Rust Render Pipeline

Aidan Murray

Because Rust has been around for so long, we were still using Unity’s old Built-in Render Pipeline, which has worked for the most part but has been very limiting in the optimisations we can apply and the effects we can render.

We have now migrated to the new Rust Render Pipeline, which is a custom Scriptable Render Pipeline made specifically for Rust by our graphics team. This gives us a lot more control over the rendering of Rust as a whole. This wasn’t easy, as we had to remake almost every effect in the game to work with this new pipeline.

The main benefit of this will be performance. At first, you should see slightly better performance in most areas of the game, as the new pipeline comes with less overhead. However, this is just the beginning. Our initial goal was to get this pipeline working in tandem with the original pipeline to ensure everything worked correctly and that we could still switch between them at runtime. Once we have fully transitioned, we will be able to optimise this pipeline further, meaning there will be more performance gains in the near future. We also have plans for improving the quality of graphics in the game where we weren’t previously able to do due to the old pipeline.

The Rust Render Pipeline can be toggled via a setting under the experimental tab so players can switch back and forth between pipelines in case there are any issues initially. This setting is only going to be here for the first month in case anyone encounters graphical or performance issues that we missed while testing. Hopefully, after the next patch, we’ll be able to remove this fully and have RRP as the default once we know that no serious issues remain.

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Anticheat: Additional Secure Servers

Ryan

Back in March we introduced the ability for servers to require TPM + Secure Boot, enabling it for 6 of our own servers.

Over the last 6+ months we have seen security feature adoption grow at a steady pace and we're ready to switch more servers to secure, continuing with the following Facepunch servers:

[US East] Facepunch 1
[EA] Facepunch 1
[EU] Facepunch 15
[EU East] Facepunch 1
[EU] Facepunch 16
[EA] Facepunch 2

Our desired goal is still to make it global for all servers in Rust, but we still have some ways to go for adoption, see adoption rates over the last 6+ months:

If your hardware supports it, we would strongly recommend you take steps to enable these features, see this support page. If you have TPM and Secure Boot already enabled feel free to give a secure server a chance, we were able to determine a reduced cheater presence on these servers a month after release.

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Crash uploading

jake

Last month we fixed EAC preventing the game from dumping crashes. This month we added uploading of crashes to our backend automatically. We now get a direct report when it happens instead of having to chase down players and manually reproduce the crash in our development builds of the game.

You should see increased game stability going forward as we can respond to crashes much more effectively now.

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rust isles - Twitch Drops

ashcook123

Don't forget to tune in to Twitch and catch the last few days of Rust Isles - your favourite creators battling for control of the seas!

Sync your accounts here to claim all Twitch Drops. And stay vigilant of scams!

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steam autumn sale

ashcook123

The Steam Autumn Sale is here!
Save 50% off Rust and all DLCs, and 20% off the Rust - Warhammer 40,000 Pack!

Already got Rust? Treat that new clan member to a copy!

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Halloween Update

Rin

On October 22nd at 18:00BST / 13:00 EST, we'll release a mandatory server and client update to enable some spooky features!

Server owners, please remember this date.

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Features

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New farmable animal - Cow
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New farmable animal - Sheep
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Added Milk, Skimmed Milk and Cream
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New Creamy and Milky versions of most pure Teas
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New Beef and Mutton Meat
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New Shepherds Pie
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New Beef Pie
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Added Wool
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Added vendor bartering mechanic
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Added decorative frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish
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Added new powergrid loot rooms to many monuments
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Revamped sandbags deployable that can be stacked up
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Machete art and animation refresh
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Added 11 New achievements
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Added Plague Hazmat Suit skin
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Made ladder hatches skinnable (all variants)
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Added client prediction for throwables

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Improvements

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Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing
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Removed duplicated hand mesh in viewmodels, saves ~100mb memory
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Trimmed 15k+ renderers from standard proc gen world
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Removed old animation clips for the old player model
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3p anim subsystem updates for many weapons
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Air Wolf vendor at Bandit Camp will no longer sell air vehicles until their helipad has been repaired
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Power Plant heavy fuse decay now scales based on server population - last 4x longer with 10 or lower players, same lifespan as before at 100 or greater players. Adjustable with convars powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, fusedecayhighpop, fusedecaylowpopscale
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Improved colliders on the entrance to Legacy Shelter so its easier to get into or out of
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Massively increased the melee protection of the Water Wheel, should be 4-5x as strong.
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Rust client now downloads store assets from our backend, showing a blurred image in progress
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Rust client no longer loads store assets by default, saving ~250MB on boot
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Rust client now dynamically unloads store assets if it hasn't been opened for a minute, saving ~450MB
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Updated some old DLC store media
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Optimized the sizes of LOD textures, saving ~100-300MB memory in some instances
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Remotely controlled turrets can now hit reactive targets
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Improved physics performance of vehicles by ticking them in parallel
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Added detailed frame timing info to the F8 performance overlay to help identify CPU/GPU bottlenecks.
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Reduced the size of the HQM collectable
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Optimized Newtonsoft JSON allocations
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Optimized blueprint buttons running updates when the crafting menu is closed
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Added analytics for signs being painted
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Improved the country selection UI in the server browser
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Improved server console compatibility with linux and windows terminals
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Admin loadouts now correctly save and load item positions
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Added option to invert the color of the brush preview when painting
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Armor plates on the attack heli now fall off in random order instead of being predictable
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Added option to change lock code on boat steering wheels
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Can now deploy smart alarms on top of other deployables
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Improved deployment of carvable pumpkins
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Horses now drop considerably less dung, livestock are more efficient
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Added colour wheel option to neon sign painting
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Added larger brush size to neon sign painting
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Painting brush outline is now a higher contrast inverted grayscale variant, the old version that shows the colour is still available behind the ConVar `paint.outlineinvert`
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Improved the performance of muzzle flashes (dont spawn graphics for flashes at great distance, dont run lights/particle systems on flashes that have already faded out and are waiting to be recycled)

handyman

Fixed

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Fixed a rare client crash that would primarily occur in the deep sea
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Fixed a console warning when hitting objects with a torch
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Possibly fixed an issue where standing too close to the wall of a player boat when entering/leaving the deep sea would leave a player behind
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Fixed handbrake on non cars not working as intended when toggle duck is enabled
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Attempt #2 to fix an issue where players would get killed in boats when driving close to the shore
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Fixed eggs dropped from wild chickens sometimes falling through the terrain
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Possibly fixed a case where players would swap between running and swimming animations when swimming on the surface of the ocean
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Fixed issues with head item overlay effects when downed/dying
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Fixed inconsistent text alignment and spacing on item descriptions in inventory UI
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Fixed dialogue on boat vendors on floating cities stating wrong direction for where to find purchased boats
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Fuseboxes now show the model for the currently inserted fuse type rather than always showing a regular fuse
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Fixed animations on player models stopping too early when using the last item in a stack on various entity types
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Jobs 4(experimental) - fixed protobuf string serialization not being thread safe
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Jobs 4(experimental) - fixed syncvar serialization not being thread safe
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Fixed PlayerMovement NREing if server sends snapshots out of order on connect
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Fixed battering ram hitting TCs through walls
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Fixed item pickup and item dropped notices layout issues
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Fixed settings search text highlighting issues
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Fixed store showing "Store content failed to load" when your Rust item inventory is totally empty
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Fixed cannon clippable through deployables
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Fixed console and menu toast occasionally drawing lines on top of each other
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Fixed hammerhead bolt ragdolling player without line of sight
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Fixed input issues with Greek and Cyrillic keyboard layouts
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Fixed player boats exploits
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Fixed campfires cooking certain foods 2x as fast
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Fixed composter showing "Turn On" and "Turn Off" options
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Fixed players being kicked by errors in background work
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Fixed RCON disconnect messages sometimes causing other RCON connections to drop out
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Fixed elevator causing NRE when saved
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Fixed server browser causing error when refreshing quickly
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Fixed a rare map generation issue causing "holes" in the ocean
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Fixed rail junctions sometimes being impassable by train
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Fixed arrows being slightly rotated inside the crossbow viewmodel
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Fixed oil rig radiation being able to start even though the locked crate was not looted
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Fixed a rare case of crates duplicating on oil rig
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Fixed minigun ammo counter not updating correctly when inside a container
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Fixed an error that could happen when using binds with a greek keyboard layout
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Fixed diving tanks and shields not occupying the backpack slot in the admin loadout UI
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Fixed hackable crates giving out more clan points than intended
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Fixed upgrading high external gates messing up attached door controller's positions
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Fixed reskinning sheet metal doors messing up attached door controller's positions
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Fixed pool cues being low quality in first person
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Fixed an exploit where players could clip their head through the roof using storage adaptors
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Fixed animation issues when shooting while in the new running animations
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Fixed triangle foundations connecting together when they shouldn't
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Fixed some items having a condition bar even though they could never lose HP
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Fixed sometimes not being able to enter cctv codes in computer station UI
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Fixed missile silo disappearing when looking from far away
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Fixed an issue with searching in the settings causing incorrect text highlighting
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Fixed PT boat turrets not appearing correctly on the death screen
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Allowed various client commands to be set from the server again
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Fixed cooking workbenches sometimes turning off mid-cooking
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Fixed drop box placement allowing for a one way peek
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Fixed salvaged cleaver sounds being audible from too far away
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Fixed a crate spawn clipping into the wall in one of the caves
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Fixed landmines being too big, caused by a recent change
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Slightly decreased the size of the HQM collectable
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Fixed locomotive bell not being audible by other players when rung
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Fixed a floating light on large oil rig exhaust
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Fixed static piano in outpost randomly breaking
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Fixed parent history antihack causing invincibility on cargo ship under weird conditions
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Fix country selection tag showing players country regardless of streamermode settings when in between updates
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Fix SyncVar buffers being leaked when using parallel saves
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Fix NaN values sometimes being generated for water level
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Fixed player count of gamemodes changing when you click on different game modes
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Fixed paintbrush outline on ornate frames

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Removed

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Removed MutexPool

What resources can THEY GIVE?

How to set up a farm?

WILL IT TANK PERFORMANCE?

Performance

Features

Improvements

Fixed

Removed

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