The Rust force wipe lands on the first Thursday of every month at 19:00 London time, bundled with Facepunch's monthly update. Every server gets a fresh map and every base is gone; blueprints only go when Facepunch or the server owner says so. Below: what actually resets, how weekly and biweekly servers fit around it, and what to do with the first hour so you are not still in a twig shack at midnight.

When the force wipe lands

The update is pushed at 19:00 London time on the first Thursday of the month. Facepunch's own wipe timer defaults to exactly that: Thursday, 19:00, Europe/London. When Facepunch announced the December 2025 patch it called 19:00 GMT the regular time, and its January 2026 post promised continued monthly updates on the first Thursday. For most of the year that is 14:00 on the US East Coast. London and New York change their clocks on different weekends, so for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the gap is four hours; the wipe countdown is pinned to 19:00 Europe/London and converts it for you. The next one is Thursday 5 November 2026.

Three places carry the official word on the day: the update post on rust.facepunch.com/news, the @playrust account on X, and the Rust Community Announcements feed on Steam, which carried Power Trip, Breach and Clear and Livestock on their release days. Mid-month patches get their own time in the previous post (the Halloween 2026 patch was announced for 22 October at 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST), and when a patch does not wipe, Facepunch says so, as it did for the 18 December 2025 Christmas update.

Why Facepunch forces it

Two things change with every monthly build. The save gets a new protocol number, the one at the end of the .sav file name, and a server on the new build will not load the old save; it creates a fresh world instead. The Facepunch wiki calls renaming an old save to dodge this dangerous and ill-advised. World generation also moves every month. Power Trip fixed gaps between rocks and terrain on procedural maps, Breach and Clear changed rock and cliff spawning, and Livestock fixed holes in the ocean, so a map rolled on last month's code would not match this month's. The bump only touches the map save; blueprints live in a separate file, player.blueprints, which is why a force wipe does not automatically take them.

What resets and what survives

Wipe type Map Bases, loot, inventories Blueprints Who decides
Map wipe Fresh save; new terrain only with a new seed Gone Kept Owner, on its schedule
Force wipe Fresh save on the new build Gone Kept unless a BP wipe is announced Facepunch, first Thursday
Blueprint wipe Untouched Untouched Cleared Facepunch or owner
Full wipe Fresh save Gone Cleared Owner, or Facepunch

Blueprints are the part people argue about. In the November 2025 Pivot Or Die post Facepunch said most servers never wipe BPs, wiped every server's blueprints with that update while cutting tech tree costs, and answered the question of monthly BP wipes with "Maybe. We're not committing to anything yet." No 2026 monthly post from Naval to Livestock announces another one. Corrosion Hour reported in December 2025, citing Facepunch staff on Discord, that official servers would wipe blueprints every wipe; that has not appeared in a patch note, so treat official-server BPs as at risk and read a community server's description before you bank on keeping yours.

Weekly, biweekly, monthly

The wipe timer has three tags. Monthly is the first Thursday at 19:00 London, weekly is every Thursday at the same time, and biweekly is the first and third Thursday, with a five-week month split two weeks plus one. Owners can move the day and hour with the wipetimer convars, which is why a weekly server might wipe on a Friday evening but still has to fall in line on force wipe Thursday. Official Facepunch servers run the monthly cycle, so their map wipe is the force wipe. Whatever the tag, the laptop in the silo counts down to that server's next wipe, and the endgame events it triggers start inside the final hour by default.

Why your server is back later than your mate's

Facepunch pushes the server and client builds at 19:00; nothing wipes by itself. Each owner has to pull the new build and restart, which Corrosion Hour's hosting notes put at 10 to 15 minutes for a plain server; modded servers also wait for their plugin framework to catch up, so they take longer. Your client needs the Steam update before it can join any updated server, so start that download at 19:00.

The first hour

A freshly wiped server starts its clock at 9 AM in-game (the November 2025 patch fixed them starting at noon), so you have a full day of light. Pick every hemp plant on the way off the beach: a plant gives 10 cloth and a sleeping bag costs 30, so three plants is a respawn point. Hit trees and small stone nodes with the rock until you have a building plan (20 wood), a hammer (100 wood), and a stone hatchet and stone pickaxe (200 wood and 100 stone each). Then the 2x1: two foundations, five walls, a doorway, two ceilings. Place the tool cupboard (1,000 wood) before anything else so your 50 metre build radius is claimed, hang a wooden door (300 wood) with a key lock (75 wood), and upgrade to stone as the pickaxe pays out. At 300 stone per foundation and wall, 210 for the doorway and 150 per ceiling, the whole box comes to about 2,600 stone. Put the bag inside, not under a tree.

The rest of day one

Then components. Road barrels and the tier-one monuments feed a recycler, and which recycler matters: a monument recycler pays 50 percent of an item's value, a safe zone one 40 percent, and the red recycler added in Power Trip pays 75 percent but needs Heavy Fuses in the grid first, which is not a day-one thing. At a monument recycler a gear is 10 scrap, a fuse or tech trash 20, a rifle body 25. The recycler calculator totals a backpack and the recycler locations guide covers which monuments have one. Bring the metal fragments home too: a workbench level 1 is 500 wood and 100 fragments (the November 2025 patch took scrap out of workbench recipes), a furnace is 200 stone, 100 wood and 50 low grade, a code lock is 100 fragments and a sheet metal door 150. By the end of day one the target is a stone 2x1 with a code lock and metal door, a furnace burning, workbench 1 placed and a few hundred scrap toward the tech tree.

Two 2026 changes bite on day one. Since Breach and Clear, red keycard monuments have blockers that take serious damage to clear, never respawn once broken and only start decaying after 24 hours, so a first-day Launch Site run is slower. Since Livestock, the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp starts the wipe in disrepair and the vendor sells nothing until players hammer resources into it, so early minicopters are a communal project. And the TC needs feeding from the start; Breach and Clear added a group tax above four authorised players, and the upkeep guide has the brackets.

How the 2026 updates have shipped

Every monthly update this year has landed on the first Thursday, from Shipshape on 5 March through Built Different on 4 June, Power Trip on 6 August and Breach and Clear on 3 September to Livestock on 1 October. The Naval update slipped from December 2025 to 5 February 2026 and the 4 December patch went out as a plain wipe with no features, which is the pattern: the wipe happens on schedule even when the content does not. Halloween 2026 runs until 5 November, the day of the next force wipe, so the event ends and the map resets in the same evening.

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