Automating Rust wipe night so you can actually play
Most Rust admins do wipe night by hand: stop the server, delete the map files, tweak the seed, start it again, wait, realise Oxide needs updating, restart again, then finally post in Discord. It takes half an hour and it always happens at the worst time.
It should be one scheduled task.
What the chain looks like
A wipe is a sequence, and the panel scheduler runs sequences. Ours looks like this:
- Snapshot — a manual backup before anything destructive
- Stop the server cleanly so the save flushes
- Wipe the map and, on a forced wipe, blueprint data
- Reseed — set a new procedural seed, or drop in your RustEdit map
- Start and wait for the plugin load to finish
- Announce via a Discord webhook
The parts people get wrong
Deleting too much. A map wipe is not a blueprint wipe. If you clear the whole server directory every Thursday you are also wiping player permissions, plugin configs and economy data. Target the specific files.
Not snapshotting first. The one time you fat-finger the seed, or a plugin update lands the same night, is the time you will want last week back.
Announcing before the server is up. Fire the webhook at the end of the chain, after the plugin load completes, or your players connect to a server that is still booting.
Set it once
Once the chain exists, put it on a cron expression — 0 19 * * 4 for 19:00 every
Thursday — and stop thinking about it. Forced wipes go on a second schedule keyed to the
first Thursday of the month.
The point is not that this is difficult. It is that doing it by hand every week is thirty minutes you could have spent playing on the server you are running.