Rust wipe countdown

What actually gets cleared

A force wipe clears the map and every player's blueprints. It is a Facepunch event tied to the monthly update, it applies everywhere, and no server can opt out of the blueprint half. This is the wipe people mean when they say "wipe day".

A weekly wipe clears the map and player inventories but leaves blueprints intact. It is entirely your operator's decision — the Thursday convention exists only because it rhymes with the monthly.

Neither clears your server's own configuration: plugins, Oxide permissions, admin lists, scheduled tasks. Those live outside the world save. New admins routinely expect to lose them and are relieved; occasionally one expects a wipe to clear a broken plugin config and is disappointed.

Planning around it

Force wipe is the busiest moment in a Rust server's month by a wide margin. Population on a healthy server can be four or five times a normal evening for the first few hours, and it is the one night your hosting is genuinely under test.

Two things are worth doing in advance. Restart shortly before the wipe so the server begins its busiest night with a clean allocation rather than three weeks of fragmented memory. And settle your map seed early — the spike is in the first hour, and regenerating because you did not like the map you got costs you precisely the window you were waiting for.

Weekly, biweekly or monthly

There is no correct answer, only a trade-off. Weekly suits servers that live on turnover and fresh starts. Monthly suits communities that want to build something worth defending. Biweekly is the common compromise and, judging by what people actually run, the most popular.

Pick one, publish it, and do not move it without notice. The schedule matters far less than its predictability — players plan their week around your wipe, and changing it quietly is the fastest way to lose the ones who care most.