Livestock breeding takes shape and scientists learn to use cover
2026-W34 · 17 Aug to 23 AugThe busiest week of the month, with 779 commits across 130 branches. Livestock gained the systems that make it a game rather than a set of props, and a long-standing pathfinding bug meant scientists had never actually used cover the way they were supposed to.
- Commits
- 779
- Developers
- 38
- Branches
- 130
- Merged to main
- 80
Livestock breeding and needs
This is the week livestock stopped being animals that stand around. Stats gate breeding, pregnancy is visible in the world, parentage is saved, and there is a social stat that makes herd size a decision.
- Animals gained a social stat: positive with about five others nearby, negative with fewer or more.#615370
- Every stat has to be above 50% before an animal will breed.#615371
- Pregnant animals sit down, so pregnancy is visible without opening the UI.#615363
- Animals save who their parent is.#615372
- Infant animals stay close to their mother.#615374
- An animal being led can be renamed from a dialog.#615383
- Timers moved onto a PersistentTimer class so growth survives a restart.#615332
- Bull prefab and a second species asset set up.#615046
- Fixed every animal being set to female.#615028
NPC pathfinding and cover
Forty-three commits of AI navigation work, including the discovery that the function used to find the closest navmesh edge had never worked. Scientists have therefore never favoured cover near walls the way the design intended.
- Fixed find-closest-edge never working, so scientists now actually favour cover near walls.#615466
- Fixed scientists not spawning at all in underwater labs and on cargo ships.#615122
- Fixed cargo scientists not moving.#615165
- Fixed NPCs getting stuck when a navmesh tile rebuilds under them or while crossing it.#615233
- Fixed old scientists trying to steer instead of turning instantly.#615156
- Fixed the oil rig scientist crouch-walking upstairs at an odd angle.#615143
- Automated tests added for wolf, crocodile and tiger jumping onto foundations.#614892
- Agent navmesh is cached instead of resolved on every call.#615468
Underground train stations
Level design work on the train tunnels. Stations are being split into rooms that shuffle between spawns, so the same station is not the same route twice.
- Small stations gained randomised rooms and a tunnel end piece.#614121
- Doors and puzzles placed into medium and large stations.#614198
- Small vendor rooms with an NPC set up as a trial.#615210
- A third large randomised room, an abandoned waiting room, added alongside a control room and boiler room.#615747
- Work continued on the large crashed station.#614266
Network range audit
An audit tool found entities being networked out to 256 metres that stop being drawn at 128. Halving their range cuts what a busy server has to send every tick, which is felt most on high population servers.
Base occlusion
Teaching the renderer to stop drawing rooms inside a base you cannot see. Large bases are one of the worst frame rate cases in Rust, so this is worth watching.
- Building block prefabs reserialised to define their faces and edges.#614678
- Fixed the edge case where interior walls were incorrectly hidden, with tests.#614774
- Rooms are not hidden until they have been out of sight for five seconds, so a closing door does not blink the room away.#614953
- A command exports a building into a format tests can replay, instead of spawning a giant base every run.#614773
Honey bandage
A new medical item that heals a little and strips radiation. Loot and vendor stock rather than a craft, so it competes with the normal bandage early wipe.
Controller support on Steam Input
Gamepad handling moved onto Steam Input as the only path. That means bindings come from Steam's own configuration system, so remapping works like other games and community layouts become possible.
Cliffs no longer leave gaps in terrain
Procedural maps sometimes spawned rock formations with visible gaps between the rock and the ground. A terrain footprint system now flattens the ground under a cliff before it is placed.
Multithreaded saving
Follow-up to August's parallel entity saving. Mostly thread safety fixes in the places that turned out not to be safe, plus a lower default batch size.
Glass assault rifle
A transparent AK for the store, with colour variants and a magazine that visibly empties as you fire.
Also this week
- Animal fencing and a deployable fence gate placed on level ground. #615170
- A step ladder deployable modelled with open and closed variants. #615896
- Apple trees tested: tree spawns support multiple prefabs, oak trees have apples for now. #615324
- Wood armour hat, gloves, jacket and trousers set up as workshop skinnable. #614562
- Flare, flashlight, nailgun, machete and salvaged hammer refresh work continued. #614225
- Vehicle pooling work to cut the cost of spawning cars, boats and helicopters. #614841
- Sculpture radial wheel text fix and a smart alarm typo. #615971
- Bloodbag given a real world model instead of a burlap sack. #614138
Read from Facepunch’s public commit log, 779 commits between 17 Aug 2026 and 24 Aug 2026. Branch work is not a promise: some of it ships in the next update, some of it never ships.