What a wipe is
A Rust server does not run on the same world forever. At a wipe, the world is reset: every base is gone, the loot inside goes with it, and everyone starts again with a rock and a torch. A wipe is what keeps Rust fair, because a group that has played for three weeks would otherwise be out of reach for anyone who joins later.
It also shapes when people play. Many servers are at their fullest in the first hours after a wipe and thin out over the following days, so the time of the next wipe is often the first thing a player wants to know about a server.
Map wipes and full wipes
There are two kinds of wipe, and the difference matters if you care about progress.
- A map wipe resets the world. You keep the blueprints you have learned, so you can craft better gear soon after you have the resources.
- A full wipe, also called a blueprint or BP wipe, resets the world and your learned blueprints, so everyone starts from nothing.
This site marks them as Map and Map + BP. When a wipe is marked only as Wipe, we know that it happened but have no evidence of what it reset. Do not read that as a map wipe. If blueprints matter to you, check the server's own announcements.
The forced wipe
The forced wipe is the one almost everybody talks about. It is reported to fall on the first Thursday of each month, at about 14:00 New York time. We have not found a Facepunch page that states this, the exact minute varies, and a date can move, so treat the time as a close guide and not a promise.
Sources disagree on whether a forced wipe also resets blueprints. We do not assume that it does. Some servers do a full wipe at the same moment and some do not, and the server's own announcement is the place to check.
Because the time is set in New York, it can shift by an hour for you when clocks change. The United States and Europe do not change their clocks on the same dates, so there are weeks each year when the usual gap between the two is different. The calendar shows dates in the time zone you choose at the top of the page.
Server schedules
Between forced wipes, each server follows its own plan. Owners can tag a server as weekly, biweekly, or monthly, and those tags reach the server list in the game. They help, but they have limits:
- The intervals are not defined. Facepunch lists the tags without saying exactly what they mean.
- Owners set them by hand, so they can be wrong. Many servers with the biweekly tag really wipe twice a week, not once every two weeks. What a server actually did says more than its tag.
- One server can follow several rules. A map wipe on Tuesday and a full wipe on Saturday is a real pattern.
- Owners usually think in local time. A server that wipes at 18:00 in Berlin stays at 18:00 in Berlin through the year, so the same wipe moves by an hour in UTC when the clocks change.
How this site knows a server wiped
Every Rust server publishes a small list of tags to Steam. One of them, called born, gives the moment its current map started. We read the Steam server list about once a minute, and when a server's born value changes, we record a wipe and mark it as confirmed. That is why a new wipe can appear here within minutes.
There are limits to this. Facepunch does not document born, so it could change, and we do not yet know how often it moves for a reason other than a wipe. It also says nothing about blueprints. The kind of a wipe comes from other evidence: the server's name, its description, or a stated schedule. All of that is the owner's word, and the game does not confirm it.
Reading the labels
- Confirmed
- The server itself reported a new map. This is the strongest label we have.
- Announced
- The owner stated a date for a wipe that has not happened yet. Plans change, and old dates are often left in descriptions, so it is a statement of intent.
- Predicted or expected
- Our estimate from a rule, not something that happened. For now most lists show confirmed wipes only, because a reliable prediction needs weeks of history.
- Cancelled
- A planned wipe that is no longer going ahead.
- Likely EU, Likely NA
- The region is our best guess from the server's address, not something the server stated.
- Team not stated
- The server says nothing about team size. It does not mean the server has no limit.
Rates and team limits are what owners claim in the server's name or description. We cannot see the settings a server really runs. The footer of the live pages shows how old the data is, and it says so if our collection falls behind.
Picking a server for wipe day
Start with your group. A team limit that fits you matters more than almost anything else, because a duo on a server with no limit will spend the week running from clans. Then choose rates that suit your time: vanilla rewards long sessions, while higher rates suit a few evenings.
Choose a region near you for a lower ping, and be careful with the player count on the day of the wipe, because nearly every server looks busy then. A server that still has players a few days after its wipe is usually the better one. Once you have a favourite, save it to keep its wipes on the Saved page.
To join quickly, copy the connect command from the server's panel, press F1 in the game to open the console, and paste it there. On a busy wipe, a minute can be the difference between a short queue and a long one.
Questions
- Why is a wipe time here different from the one on a server's Discord?
- We show times in the zone selected at the top of the page, and the server may be quoting its own local time. Check the zone first. If they still disagree, the owner's plan may have changed, and the owner is the better source for a wipe that has not happened yet.
- Why can't I find a server in the Wipes list?
- The lists show live servers, meaning those that reached at least 10 players in the last 7 days. The Servers page searches beyond that, by name, region, or address.
- Why does a server have no wipe yet?
- We can only record a wipe that happens while we are watching, so a server that is new to us shows its first wipe once we have seen one.
- Is this an official site?
- No. It is an unofficial fan project, as explained on the About page.