Rust wipe countdown

When force wipe happens

Facepunch ships the Rust monthly update on the first Thursday of every month, and every server, official or community, has to wipe its map when it installs that update. The patch goes live at 7pm in London, which is 2pm on the US East Coast for most of the year and 11am on the West Coast. The countdown above uses the London time and handles daylight saving on both sides of the Atlantic, so the hour you see is the hour it happens.

Servers do not all come back at the same minute. Hosts have to download the update, generate a new map and restart, so the big official servers tend to be up within the hour while some community servers take longer. If your server is still down twenty minutes after the countdown hits zero, that is normal.

Why it is called a force wipe

Between monthly updates, every server picks its own schedule: weekly on Thursdays, every two weeks, monthly, or something custom. Those are optional wipes that the owner chooses. The force wipe is different because the update changes the map generation and the save format, so an old save cannot be loaded on the new build. There is no choice involved, which is why it is the one date every Rust player shares.

Blueprints are a separate matter. A force wipe resets the map and everything built on it, but blueprints stay unless Facepunch announces a blueprint wipe with a particular update, which happens a few times a year, or the server owner decides to wipe them. The force wipe guide covers what resets and how to plan the first hour.

Getting ready

Wipe day is the one day the whole server starts from zero, so the hour before matters. Have your group's spawn plan agreed, know which monument you are running first and have the recycler calculator bookmarked for the first scrap run. Put the calendar event or Discord message below where your group will see it and nobody has to ask "when is wipe" again.