The October hit last week and the developers are already back at it with several rounds of hotfixes and a fresh batch of work in progress. This week brings more livestock cleanup, continued character customization work, controller improvements, rendering and performance updates, and a few new features starting to take shape.

Hotfixes since last week

Since last week's update, the developers have pushed several rounds of hotfixes addressing bugs, balance, and performance issues introduced with the patch.

Fixed a volumetric cloud performance regression
Fixed crabs and jellyfish sometimes being invisible
Fixed garage doors blocking navmesh on floors above them
Fixed livestock taking damage in safe zones
Fixed several livestock AI issues, including hover cows, aggressive sheep, bulls running in circles, stuck headbutt behavior, and livestock attacking mounted players
Improved livestock overlap behavior, lead visuals, and shearing effects
Fixed missing wool on lambs at close range
Fixed sprint animations for the Medieval, Jungle, and Abyss AK skins
Fixed runaway livestock breeding
Fixed water jug recycling
Fixed the Biofuel Generator snapping in the wrong direction
Fixed several livestock vendor dialogue and spawning issues
Fixed missing RRP backgrounds in the skin viewer and store
Optimized livestock textures
Improved Legacy Shack entrance navigation
Increased water wheel durability
Added a timer to the Dome oil pump
Various client performance optimizations
Staging clients can no longer join Release servers
Fixed the wool vendor not specifying the minimum quantity needed to sell
Fixed boars fleeing at high health
Fixed the loadout popup appearing behind the F1 menu
Fixed a Rust+ connection issue

More livestock work

Livestock continues to see plenty of attention following last week's release. Full bonding now takes 15 minutes instead of 5, curious cows no longer bond twice as quickly, safeguards have been added to stop wild-born calves from helping populations explode, and servers now have a cap of 300 livestock per species. Server owners also have new controls for culling excess livestock and optionally restricting breeding to areas near a bonded player's TC.

Development continues beyond the hotfixes too. Pen space calculations have been reworked, free-range herds stop reproducing once they hit their cap, cows line up with troughs more naturally, and animals are less likely to clip into each other. Lead break distance has also increased from 7 to 15 meters, familiarity and gender are shown by default, and additional fixes are being made to feeding, aging, movement, and animations.

Milky tea bulk crafting

The new livestock-related teas are getting a small quality of life improvement. Mixing Table recipes have been added for all of the new Milky and Creamy Teas, allowing players to bulk craft them instead of making everything one at a time.

They can still be crafted normally through the crafting menu, with the same ingredients and crafting time.

Wool Armor Insert

A new Wool Armor Insert is also in development. Current work-in-progress values have it costing 20 wool to craft and sitting on the Tier 1 tech tree, providing 3 cold protection, 2 melee protection, and 1 projectile protection.

Those numbers are specifically marked as WIP, so expect some tuning before this one is finalized.

Character customization

Work on the upcoming character customization system remains very active. The creator has now shifted over to a new vertical design, following the broader layout changes made earlier this week. The underwear category remains, eyebrows have been removed as their own category, and categories with no additional options can now be disabled entirely.

There has also been a significant round of polish and optimization. The developers removed supersampling when creating character icons for a large performance improvement, cleaned up the grid system, reduced the number of available skin tones per skin color, and fixed issues with fading, lighting, underwear prompts, and characters teleporting back to the starting position when first opening the menu.

Tattoos return

Tattoo development has also sprung back to life alongside the character customization work. A first pass has been made at getting tattoos functioning again, including fixes for face tattoos, updated UV handling, and separate texture resolutions for face and body tattoos.

There is also a new Tattoo Gun in development. Exactly how players will apply or manage tattoos through the gun is still unclear from the commits, but the pieces are clearly starting to come together.

Controller support takes a big step

Controller development continues at a quick pace, and one of the biggest changes this week is default gamepad support now being enabled. The developers are also setting up gamepad configuration files to ship directly with the game, allowing controller layouts to be managed and updated per release.

Recent input changes include crafting moving to D-pad down across all action sets, sprint toggle working while stationary, run toggle persisting between movement sprints, separate sensitivity values per axis, additional deadzone work, and fixes for resulting menu drift.

RRP moving closer

Rust's new rendering pipeline continues moving toward wider adoption. RRP received another merge into main this week, while the development branch has shifted the RRP asset to the default graphics configuration. The old rrp.enabled setting has been removed, with disabling the renderer now handled through a development-only option instead.

Recent work also includes improved RRP initialization, additional rendering debugger tools, fixes for shadows and lighting, corrected skin viewer backgrounds through glass, UI blur fixes, a flare-related crash fix, and motion vector improvements for foliage, animal fur, and horse hair.

Performance and optimization

There is a pretty substantial optimization push underway this week across both client and server. One of the biggest server-side wins reduces SpawnDistribution memory usage from around 780MB to roughly 40MB while making sampling about three times faster. In testing, this also cut server startup time from around 4 seconds to 2.5 seconds.

World serialization work saves another roughly 175MB on a 4500-size map, while entity spawning, crafting, projectiles, cooking visuals, lighting, boats, team UI, Quick Craft, texture streaming, wounded UI, map markers, sounds, and prefab lookups are all seeing smaller improvements. Audio has received a large cleanup as well, with standard compression applied to more than 6,000 clips and several high-memory sounds adjusted or removed.

Horse optimizations

Horses are getting their own round of performance work. Server-side leg and hip calculations have been heavily optimized, with one test of 50 moving horses dropping hip position calculations from around 2.2ms to just 0.09ms per frame.

Additional changes skip unnecessary animation updates, reduce work on stationary or unridden horses, reuse ground checks where possible, disable unused constraints when certain armor isn't equipped, and clean up pooling issues affecting horse animations.

Faster maps

The in-game map continues to receive dedicated optimization work. Mission provider states and vending machine markers are now cached rather than rebuilt every time the map opens, with developer testing showing savings of around 100ms for mission providers and another 80ms on a server with 170 vending machines.

More recent work also fixes the map UI allocating memory every frame while open and stops the fade system from continuing to update all of its children for several seconds after closing. Monument markers disappearing due to the deep sea layer and junk accumulating in the shop marker cache after reconnecting have also been fixed.

Softcore TC limits

Softcore servers are getting a new Tool Cupboard limit, currently set to a maximum of three TCs per player. The system works similarly to the sleeping bag limit, showing the current amount and notifying players once they hit the cap.

TCs can also be displayed on the map when the limit system is enabled. They cluster together with sleeping bags and have their own visibility toggle, making it easier to keep track of where your limited placements are being used.

Underground train network

Work continues on the underground train network overhaul. This week has seen more progress on the break room along with earlier updates to the underground medium station and randomized room layouts.

There still isn't enough in the commits to say exactly how all of these pieces will change the underground experience, but the branch remains active and clearly has more planned.

Other stuff

Firecracker and grenade animation work continues with new drop animations, viewmodel support, camera animation fixes, and increased throw velocity.
An electronic chessboard is in development for the High Stakes DLC, with ongoing model, material, and texture work.
The Scrap King building skin received updated texture atlases and meshes.
Early development has started on a new flail weapon.
The Biofuel Generator now only consumes electricity while actively producing fuel
The livestock vendor sale penalty for bought or found animals has been increased
Milk can stack when skim timers are within one minute of each other, and skimming works even when food spoiling is disabled
Boars now wait until they're below 30% health before fleeing instead of 75%
Scrap Helicopter dismount points have been adjusted so players aren't always dropped out at the front
Sail wind behavior is now handled fully server-side to prevent client/server mismatches
The Ferry Terminal rope ladder has been improved
The RC Computer screen blur has been fixed
Furnaces, BBQs, Flame Turrets, Mixing Tables, and similar entities have received fixes for incorrect sounds playing when spawned
Console autocomplete now supports more entity and item commands
Support has been added for clearing Rust+ authorization from smart entities in-game
Multiline console input has been restored
Underwater Labs mission event handling has received several fixes
Sleeping bag compass icons have been cleaned up
The Bee Grenade no longer appears white when throw prediction is enabled
Helicopter flare saving has been fixed
The Food crafting category has been moved after Electrical in the crafting menu