Rust Wipe Explained: Force, Weekly & BP Wipes

A Rust wipe wipes the slate. A force wipe hits the first Thursday of every month around 19:00 UTC, resets the map AND every blueprint you own, and lands the whole server back at zero. A weekly wipe is the softer version most servers run in between: it resets the map and all bases but keeps your blueprints, so you're rebuilding walls, not re-researching the AK. Those are the two events your Rust calendar revolves around, and knowing which one is coming decides how you spend your night.

Everything below is the practical version of that. What a wipe actually clears, the three types you'll hear people argue about, the schedule Facepunch runs on, how to find a server that just reset, and where console splits off from PC.

What a Rust Wipe Actually Is

A wipe is a scheduled reset of server progress. Your base, your loot, the map layout, that barrel you stashed two grids north, gone. Everyone starts naked on a fresh island at the same moment, which is the whole point. A server left running forever calcifies. The big clans entrench, the map fills with decaying bases, and new players get farmed on spawn with no path up. The reset is the pressure valve.

So a wipe isn't a bug or a server crash. It's the format. Veterans plan around it and treat the first day after a force wipe as the most valuable hours of the month, because that's when the gap between the best player and the worst is smallest.

Force Wipe vs Weekly Wipe vs Blueprint Wipe

These three terms cause most of the confusion, so here's the clean version.

A force wipe is mandatory and server-wide across all of Rust. When Facepunch pushes the monthly update on the first Thursday, every official server and effectively every community server is forced to wipe both the map and blueprints. Nobody opts out. This is the big one.

A weekly wipe (some servers run biweekly instead) is a server owner's choice. It resets the map and every base and every bit of loot, but it leaves blueprints alone. You keep everything you've researched. That means you can go from naked to a full gun loadout fast, because the tech tree is already unlocked in your account for that server. Weekly wipes keep a server feeling fresh without forcing everyone through the full grind again.

A blueprint wipe, or BP wipe, specifically means your unlocked blueprints reset. Here's the part people miss: a force wipe is always a BP wipe too, because the monthly reset clears blueprints by design. When someone says "it's a BP wipe week," they mean the tech tree resets and nobody has anything researched. A pure map wipe is not a BP wipe. That distinction is the single most important thing to check before you commit an evening.

Quick version: force wipe resets map + blueprints, weekly wipe resets map only, BP wipe is the blueprint half that force wipes always include.

Why the Blueprint Half Matters So Much

On a BP wipe, the first hours are a knife fight. Nobody has a gun, nobody has explosives, and the tech tree is a wide-open sprint where scrap is the real currency. Whoever researches the right blueprints in the right order pulls ahead, and a bad opening can cost you the whole cycle. If you want the exact rush order for those hours, the progression guide lays it out step by step.

On a map-only wipe, the veterans already own their loadouts. They kept their blueprints, so they're crafting AKs while you're still knapping a bow. You're not racing the tech tree, you're racing to a defensible base before the geared players come knocking. Know which night you're walking into before you pick a server.

The Rust Wipe Schedule

The anchor is the first Thursday of every month, around 19:00 UTC, when Facepunch ships the monthly update and force-wipes everything. Mark it. That's the date that never moves, and it's when the population spikes hardest because the entire playerbase resets together.

Between those monthly force wipes, servers set their own rhythm. The common patterns:

• chevron_rightWeekly, usually Thursday, map-only reset that keeps blueprints
• chevron_rightBiweekly, every other Thursday, for servers that want a slightly longer cycle
• chevron_rightMonthly-only, wiping just on the force wipe, for players who want a long grind
• chevron_rightCustom, some high-pop servers wipe twice a week or on their own schedule

Thursday is the unofficial wipe day for Rust because the force wipe falls there, and a lot of owners sync their weekly wipes to match. Assume Thursday evening is when the fresh servers light up. I keep a wipe timer open so I'm never guessing, and the wipe schedule shows when the next force wipe lands.

What Actually Resets on a Wipe

On any map wipe, force or weekly, these clear:

• chevron_rightThe map itself, regenerated from the server's seed or a fresh one, so the terrain, roads, and monuments can shift
• chevron_rightEvery base and structure, including yours, no matter how deep the honeycomb
• chevron_rightAll loot and storage, boxes, furnaces, tool cupboards, everything inside them
• chevron_rightAll deployables and vehicles you built or claimed

On a force wipe, add one more, the big one:

• chevron_rightBlueprints, your entire researched tech tree resets to default

What does not reset, ever, is your account-level stuff. Your hours, your skins and cosmetics, your Steam inventory. Those live with your account, not the server, so a wipe never touches them. You spawn naked, but your rare AK skin is still sitting in your inventory waiting for a gun you haven't crafted yet.

How to Find Fresh Servers After a Wipe

A just-wiped server is where you want to be, because joining three days late means everyone's already geared and you're spawning into other people's endgame. In the in-game server browser, sort by "Last Wipe" or check the wipe time listed in the server description. Most community servers put their schedule right in the name or tags, things like "Weekly Thursday" or "Monthly."

Third-party trackers like BattleMetrics and just-wiped listing sites are faster than the in-game browser. They let you filter by wipe time and population so you can catch a server the moment it resets. Aim to join within the first hour if you can. The population is highest, the map is untouched, and nobody has a gear advantage yet.

One tip: match the server's wipe schedule to how much you actually play. If you only game a few nights a week, a weekly BP-wipe server means you're perpetually behind. A map-only weekly or a monthly server lets your progress stick longer.

PC vs Console: The Wipe Differences

Console Rust runs on its own update track. It follows a monthly update that usually lands in the same first-Thursday window as PC, but the exact timing can differ and console content sometimes trails the PC version. The force-wipe concept is identical, map plus blueprints reset on the monthly update, but don't assume the console wipe fires the same minute the PC one does.

The other difference is the server ecosystem. PC has a massive community-server scene with every wipe schedule imaginable, from twice-weekly to monthly, plus heavy modding. Console is more limited, with official servers and a smaller pool of community options, so you get fewer wipe-schedule choices. The core loop is the same on both, the flexibility around it is where PC pulls ahead.