Rust Wipe Schedules Explained: Map Wipes, BP Wipes, and Your Server

Every Rust server wipes. It is the only mainstream survival game where periodically deleting the world is not a disaster but the entire content model, and it is the first thing a new server owner has to understand before anything else makes sense. Your wipe schedule decides who plays on your server, how long they stay, and how much admin work you sign up for every cycle. This guide explains what wiping actually deletes, what Facepunch forces on you, and how to pick and run a schedule without burning out.

What Wiping Actually Means

Rust has two separate kinds of progress, and each has its own wipe:

• Map wipe. The world itself is deleted and regenerated. Every base, every deployed item, every locked crate on the map disappears. The server generates a fresh procedural map from a seed and a world size, so the terrain, monument placement, and resource layout are new. Player inventories go with it, because inventories live in the save file.
• Blueprint wipe (BP wipe). Blueprints are the crafting recipes players have permanently learned by researching items. They persist across map wipes by design, which is what gives regulars a head start on a fresh map. A BP wipe deletes that learned progression too, putting everyone back to crafting stone tools and researching from scratch.

Wiping exists because Rust's progression is front loaded. The first three or four days of a wipe are the game: fighting over early monuments, racing to guns, online raiding while bases are still weak. Two weeks in, the map is a graveyard of decaying compounds owned by groups that already won, server population sags, and late joiners get farmed by players in full metal kits. A wipe resets the race. It also resets the entity count, which is why late-wipe servers feel sluggish: hundreds of thousands of player-built entities tax the simulation, a problem covered in our server lag guide.

The Forced Monthly Wipe

Facepunch forces one wipe on every server, official and community alike: the first Thursday of each month, landing around 19:00 UTC alongside the monthly client update. Two rules govern it:

• The map always wipes. The monthly update usually changes world generation or entity data enough that old saves are incompatible, so every server regenerates its map on first Thursday. You cannot opt out.
• Blueprints wipe only when Facepunch says so. BP wipes are not on a fixed calendar. Facepunch forces a global BP wipe occasionally, typically alongside updates that significantly change item progression, and announces it in advance in the update news. Between forced BP wipes, whether blueprints survive is entirely your call as the server owner.

Everything else about your schedule is built around that fixed monthly anchor.

Common Community Schedules

Community servers advertise their cadence right in the server name, because players filter by it. The three standard patterns:

Schedule	Map wipes	Typical BP policy	Who it attracts
Weekly	Every Thursday	Often monthly, sometimes weekly	High-hours players, clans, PvP-first groups
Biweekly	Forced Thursday plus a mid-cycle wipe	Usually monthly	Regular players who want a full base cycle without a month of decay
Monthly	Forced wipe only	Monthly or only when forced	Casual players, builders, small groups with jobs

The trade is always the same. Shorter cycles mean sharper population curves: a weekly server is packed Thursday through Sunday, then empties, then refills. Sweaty players love this because the exciting part of the game repeats every seven days. Longer cycles mean gentler curves and calmer players: a monthly server keeps a moderate population for two or three weeks, attracts people who want their base to matter, and dies quietly in week four. There is no schedule that stays full all cycle. You are choosing which decay curve you can live with.

BP policy tunes the same dial. Keeping blueprints across map wipes rewards returning regulars and softens the grind for your core community. Wiping BPs frequently keeps every cycle a level playing field but punishes casual players hardest, since they re-grind progression they barely finished last time.

How Wipes Interact with Your Hosting Setup

On a hosted server, a wipe is a file operation, and knowing which files hold what is the difference between a clean wipe and an accidental purge of your VIP list.

The server identity folder

Rust stores all persistent world state under server/<identity>/, where the identity is the name set by the server.identity launch parameter (your host sets this for you, often in the panel). Inside it you will find the map save files, named after the map type, world size, and seed, such as proceduralmap.4500.12345.sav and its matching .map file, plus databases like player.blueprints.*.db for learned blueprints and player.deaths.db for death history.

• A map wipe means deleting the .sav and .map files, or simply changing the seed so the server generates and saves a new map.
• A BP wipe means additionally deleting the player.blueprints.*.db file.

Most host panels wrap this in one-click "wipe map" and "wipe blueprints" buttons, but they are doing exactly this underneath, and knowing that lets you verify the button did what it claimed.

Oxide data persists on purpose

If you run Oxide/uMod plugins, their state lives outside the identity folder, in oxide/config/ for settings and oxide/data/ for stored data. A map wipe does not touch these, which is usually what you want: your kits, your economy balances, your permission groups all survive. Some plugins store map-specific data (teleport homes, base locations) that becomes garbage after a wipe; well-built ones detect a new save and reset themselves, but check each plugin's documentation, because some expect you to clear their data file manually on wipe day.

Scheduled tasks and map rotation

Hosts that cater to Rust usually offer a task scheduler in the panel. Mature setups automate the whole cycle: a scheduled task announces the wipe in-game, stops the server at the appointed hour, deletes the save files, swaps in a new seed, and restarts. If you run custom maps instead of procedural generation, the same scheduler can rotate the map URL each cycle. Automating this matters more than it sounds, because first Thursday wipes are time-sensitive: players hop to whichever server in their list is up and fresh first, and a server that comes back an hour late misses the wave.

Running Wipe Day as an Admin

A wipe day checklist, in order:

1. Announce early and repeatedly. Post the wipe time and whether BPs wipe in your Discord days ahead, and again the morning of. Players plan their week around it. Surprise wipes are how you lose regulars.
2. Pick the seed deliberately. The seed is just a number, but it determines monument layout, and players care. Community sites let you preview generated maps by seed and size, so browse a few instead of taking whatever random number the restart produces. A map with good monument spread and usable rivers keeps players longer.
3. Set the world size for your population. Default is 4500. A 4500 map with 40 players feels deserted; a 3000 or 3500 map keeps the same population bumping into each other, which is what makes Rust work. Small servers should run small maps.
4. Update everything before restart. Wipe day coincides with the monthly client update, and Oxide needs a matching build before your plugins load. Update the server, update Oxide, then update plugins, in that order. A modded server that restarts before Oxide releases its update comes up as a vanilla server or not at all.
5. Verify, then open. Join first yourself. Check that permissions survived, kits work, the map is the one you picked, and stability is normal. Five minutes of checking beats fielding a hundred Discord pings.

If you are standing up your first server rather than wiping an existing one, start with our Rust server setup guide and come back here for cycle two.

What Not to Wipe

Wipe day mistakes are almost always over-deletion. Unless you specifically intend to reset them, leave these alone:

• Oxide permission data. The users and groups files in oxide/data/ hold every permission grant on your server, including VIP ranks people may have paid for. Deleting them means rebuilding your permission tree from memory.
• Plugin data that represents people, not the map. Economy balances, playtime trackers, vote reward counters, ban and mute records. These are your community's history and your moderation trail.
• Your configs. server.cfg, plugin configs in oxide/config/, and your panel's startup parameters carry weeks of tuning. Take a copy off the server before every wipe regardless, because wipe day is exactly when a mistyped delete happens. Backups also cover you if the update itself corrupts something, and access hygiene around your panel and FTP is covered in the server security guide.

The clean mental model: the identity folder's save files are the world, everything else is the community. Wipe the world on schedule. Wipe the community never.

Choosing a Schedule for a New Server

The tempting move is to copy the biggest servers: weekly wipes, monthly BPs, 4500 map. Resist it. Big servers sustain weekly wipes because thousands of players refill them every Thursday. A new server running the same schedule wipes away its ten loyal players' progress every week and offers nothing in return.

Pick by niche instead:

• If your players are working adults, run monthly wipes with persistent BPs and say so in the server name. You become the server where their effort is not deleted before the weekend.
• If you want PvP regulars, run biweekly maps with monthly BPs. It is the middle path with the widest appeal, and the most common choice for new community servers for good reason.
• If you are building for a clan or a Discord community you already have, ask them. A schedule your existing players voted for retains better than any theoretical optimum.

Whatever you choose, put it in the server title and never miss a date. "2x Monthly | BP wipe with forced" tells players exactly what they are investing in. A server that wipes when it promised, updates on time on first Thursday, and protects the data that should persist earns the only currency that matters in Rust hosting: players who come back next wipe. For picking the hosting itself, see our Rust hosting comparison.