Rust Wipe Schedule: When Is the Next Forced Wipe?

Mark the first Thursday of every month. That's when Facepunch ships Rust's monthly update. Every server has to install it and start over on a fresh map.

At 19:00 UTC it's 2 pm in New York, 11 am in Los Angeles and 8 pm in Berlin. In Sydney it's already Friday morning. After November come 3 December, 7 January, 4 February, 4 March and 1 April.

No server can skip this wipe. Most also wipe on their own in between, weekly or every two weeks, and many reset blueprints along with the map. Below: the dates in your time zone, what each wipe takes, and how to catch a server in its first hours.

When is the next Rust forced wipe?

Why "forced"? Because the update isn't optional. A player on the new version can't join a server still on the old one. And the new server build can't load the old world. So the owner updates, and the map starts over. That goes for official and community servers, vanilla or modded.

Read 19:00 UTC as "around". The update goes live on Steam at about that hour. Then each server goes down, updates and comes back on its own. Most are up again within an hour or two; the big modded ones sometimes take longer.

The forced wipe page on Rust Wipes lists the servers wiping that day. They're ranked by how many players came to their last wipe.

What time is the forced wipe in my time zone?

Get the hour wrong and you join late, after everyone else has a head start. The table has the hour in seven places, and with JavaScript on, the countdown adds yours. Three things catch people out:

• East Asia and Oceania wipe on Friday. 19:00 UTC is 4 am in Tokyo and 6 am in Sydney, the next day. In Australia, it's a Friday-morning wipe.
• The hour moves when clocks change. The calendar keeps 19:00 UTC all year. New York's winter 2 pm becomes 3 pm on 1 April 2027, after the US moves to summer time. London's 7 pm becomes 8 pm once the UK switches too.
• "2 pm Eastern" isn't always the same moment. Some players quote the wipe that way all year. In US summer time, that would be 18:00 UTC, an hour before the calendar's. In summer, check the day's update announcement before you plan to the minute.

What is a wipe: map wipe or blueprint wipe?

This is the difference between losing your base and losing everything you've learned. A wipe deletes the server's save.

A map wipe deletes the world. Every base, every box, everything you placed, every inventory. Every Tool Cupboard and every Sleeping Bag. The owner often makes a new map too, with a new seed or size. So last month's build spot may be gone.

A blueprint wipe goes further. A blueprint is a recipe you've unlocked, and this wipe takes them all. Every one researched at a Research Table or unlocked in a workbench's tech tree. You're back to the default recipes everyone starts with.

The forced wipe is always a map wipe. On most servers, Facepunch's official ones included, it's a blueprint wipe too.

A community owner can keep blueprints through it, unless the update itself demands a reset. Facepunch says so in the update notes when it does.

Between forced wipes, weekly servers usually reset only the map. They save the blueprint wipe for the first Thursday. Servers say which in their name or description: look for "BP wipe" or "map only".

Why do servers wipe every week or two on their own?

A month is a long time in Rust. By week two, the big groups sit in armored compounds and the map is packed with bases. A solo who joins late has nowhere to build and nobody poor enough to raid.

Players drift off, the server empties, and nobody joins an empty server. A wipe resets the race, and player counts peak in the first hours after it. A full map is also heavy for the server to run, and a wipe clears it.

So owners pick a cadence (how often they wipe) and stick to it, at a fixed weekday and hour. A wipe calendar sorts servers by the gap between their last two wipes:

• Weekly: same weekday and hour every week, at most eight days between wipes.
• Biweekly: every two weeks, up to sixteen days apart.
• Monthly: only the forced wipe. The next wipe isn't the last one plus 30 days. It's the next first Thursday, at the hour the server last wiped.

Thursday is the favourite day for weekly servers. That way the forced wipe lands on their normal schedule, instead of two wipes in a few days. Weekend wipes, on Friday or Saturday, chase the players with the most free time.

Enter a server's last wipe and how often it wipes. The calculator finds the next one by the same rules. It also shows how far into the current wipe the server already is.

What should you do before a wipe?

Nothing in a box survives a map wipe. So the last days of a wipe are for spending, not saving.

Burn the explosives you were keeping for later. A raid with charges you'd lose anyway is free. The raid cost chart shows what each wall takes.

Late in a wipe, blueprints are the one thing worth investing in. But only when you know they'll stay.

How do you pick a server that just wiped?

Join in the first hour, when everyone has just a Rock and nobody has a base yet. A calendar of real wipes saves you the search.

The Rust Wipes calendar lists the next wipe of every community server it polls. It ranks them by how many players came to the last one. You can filter by region and by weekly, biweekly or monthly servers.

What do you need in the first hour of a fresh wipe?

The first hour decides who gets the good build spots. You spawn with a Rock and a Torch, and you gather everything else.

The first base costs very little. The hard part is building it before your neighbours do. Each item below is a default recipe, so it survives a blueprint wipe. None of them needs a workbench:

Plan, hammer, cupboard, door and lock come to 1,495 wood before a single wall. So farm wood first.

Swap the lock for a Code Lock (100 Metal Fragments) as soon as you have the metal. Anyone who loots a key gets in. The crafting calculator adds up a longer list for you.

The climb after that is where a blueprint wipe hurts. A Workbench Level 2 takes 500 Metal Fragments, 20 High Quality Metal and 5 Basic Blueprint Fragments.

A Workbench Level 3 takes 1,000 fragments, 100 High Quality Metal and 5 Advanced Blueprint Fragments. Twenty basic fragments combine into one advanced. Fragments are loot, so they go with the map like everything else.