LivestockControl

The problem

Facepunch shipped cows and sheep with over a hundred console settings, no menu, and no way to tell one player apart from another. Every setting applies to the whole server. Herds spawn wherever the game likes, including in your safe zones. One player can fill a whole valley with cattle. And the admin commands only act on the nearest animal.

You can bolt on a herd cap from one plugin, a gene editor from another, and a dashboard from a third. LivestockControl is the whole job in one menu.

Decide where wild herds spawn

Draw no-spawn zones by standing on the spot and typing /lsc zone add 200. Keep cows and sheep out of monuments and safe zones with one switch each. Pick which biomes each species may spawn in: cows only in Temperate, sheep only in Tundra, whatever your map needs.

Blocked spawns are removed the moment they appear, and the game fills the population somewhere you allowed. Your wild density stays the same. Only the places change.

Hidden genes as a VIP perk

Since the November update, every player sees an animal's dominant genes. The hidden (recessive) genes, the yield and the dung rate stay a question mark.

Grant livestockcontrol.panels and that player sees all of it, live, with no reconnect. Revoke it and the question marks come back. Breeders pay for that kind of information.

Every livestock setting, in one menu

/lsc opens a menu with every livestock setting the game has, sorted into Spawns, Breeding, Genes, Trust, Needs, Vendor, Panels and Debug. Type a value and it applies at once, turns yellow so you can see what you changed, and survives a restart, even if your server.cfg says otherwise. Bad values are refused with a message instead of breaking your server.

The list is read from the game when the plugin loads, so when Facepunch adds a setting, it shows up in the menu without a plugin update.

Three presets ship with it: Vanilla (puts every setting back to default), PvE Relaxed and Hardcore Breeder. Add your own in the config.

Also included

Herd limits by permission. Set how many cows and sheep a player may keep: 10 by default, 25 for livestockcontrol.limit.vip, or any group you add in the menu. At the limit, the player's animals stop breeding and new animals cannot make the player's cupboard their home. Cows and sheep count separately. The owner is the player who placed the cupboard.

Animal editor. Look at any cow or sheep and press Inspect: name, sex, age, condition, home, both copies of every gene, and who it trusts. Change any gene, swap its sex, grow a calf up, heal it, feed it, rename it, or make it a god clone with every gene Good. Spawn animals of either species, sex and age, with random genes, god genes, or a copy of the one you inspected. Spawn a special named animal from the game's own list.

Protection. One switch: homed animals take no damage from players who are not authorised on their cupboard and not on the owner's team. Wild animals are never protected.

Cleanup. Cull down to the game's per-species cap with one button. Turn on the abandoned-herd cull, and animals whose owners have been away for more than 7 days (you set the number) are removed every hour. It shows how many it would remove and asks before the first run. Nobody is culled on install day.

Features

• Wild spawn control: no-spawn zones, monuments, safe zones, biomes per species
• Hidden genes, yield and dung shown only to players with a permission
• Menu over every livestock setting, auto-discovered from the game
• Presets, including a one-click reset to vanilla
• Herd limits per permission group, cows and sheep counted separately
• Animal editor: genes, sex, age, name, condition, god clone
• Spawn any cow or sheep, including the game's special named animals
• Optional protection for homed animals
• Cull excess and abandoned-herd cleanup, with a confirm step
• Settings survive restarts and beat server.cfg
• Updated and tested for the November 2026 Rust update
• Oxide and Carbon

Commands

Permissions

• livestockcontrol.admin — the menu and every command
• livestockcontrol.panels — see hidden genes, yield and dung on animal panels
• livestockcontrol.limit.<name> — herd limit groups; livestockcontrol.limit.vip ships with 25 cows and 25 sheep

Configuration

Everything is editable in the menu. The file, for reference:

{
  "Var Overrides (name -> value)": {},
  "Presets (name -> var -> value)": {
    "Vanilla": {},
    "PvE Relaxed": { "livestock.familiarityrate": "2", "livestock.conditionfallseconds": "7200", "livestock.grudgeduration": "15" },
    "Hardcore Breeder": { "livestock.genegoodchance": "0.1", "livestock.genebadchance": "0.4", "livestock.inbredscale": "0.3", "livestock.conditionfallseconds": "2400", "livestock.specialchance": "0.002" }
  },
  "Default Herd Limit (0 = none)": { "Cows": 10, "Sheep": 10 },
  "Herd Limits by Permission (livestockcontrol.limit.<name>)": { "vip": { "Cows": 25, "Sheep": 25 } },
  "Spawn: Blocked Zones": [],
  "Spawn: Block In Monuments": false,
  "Spawn: Block In Safe Zones": true,
  "Spawn: Cow Biomes (empty = all)": [],
  "Spawn: Sheep Biomes (empty = all)": [],
  "Unhomed Tame Animals Cannot Breed While Limits Are On": true,
  "Protect Homed Animals From Strangers": false,
  "Cull Abandoned Herds": false,
  "Abandoned After Days": 7.0,
  "Abandoned Cull Confirmed": false
}

A limit of 0 means no limit. When a player holds several limit groups, the highest wins.

Requirements

Paradox DLL 1.0.5+

Support

Every purchase comes with the private updates channel in our Discord and updates for the life of the plugin. Your download lives on your purchases page the moment payment clears.