Rust wipe schedule 2026: forced wipes, BP wipes, and custom cadences

Rust is wipe driven by design. Facepunch ships a forced map wipe with every monthly update on the first Thursday, and forces a full blueprint wipe at the start of every new content cycle. Community servers layer on top of that, picking weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly cadences that suit their player base. This page is the canonical reference for both: the upstream Facepunch calendar, and the commands and files you need to schedule your own.

Facepunch forced wipe calendar

The forced wipe always lands on the first Thursday of the month at approximately 19:00 UTC, immediately after the monthly patch goes live. The dates below are the upcoming forced wipes for 2026.

Map wipes versus blueprint wipes

Two different wipe types are often confused. A map wipe is forced every month and regenerates the procedural world. A blueprint wipe clears every player's learned blueprints back to the default set, and happens only at the start of a new content cycle.

Scheduling your own wipes

Community servers can wipe at any cadence the owner wants. The common choices, ranked by community popularity, are weekly Thursday, bi-weekly Thursday, monthly forced wipe only, and 2x or 3x sites that wipe twice a week.

Wiping is a file delete plus a clean restart. From the server identity directory:

$# Stop the server first
$systemctl stop rustserver
$
$# Map wipe only (keep blueprints)
$cd /home/rust/server/rust_server/save123
$rm -f *.map *.sav *.sav.*
$
$# Full wipe (map + blueprints)
$rm -f *.map *.sav *.sav.* player.blueprints.5.db
$
$# Restart
$systemctl start rustserver

Automating wipes with cron

A weekly Thursday wipe at 19:00 UTC, matching upstream, lives in a crontab one line away from done:

$# Weekly Thursday wipe at 19:00 UTC
$0 19 * * 4 /usr/local/bin/rust-wipe.sh map >> /var/log/rust-wipe.log 2>&1
$
$# Monthly BP wipe, first Thursday of the month at 19:05 UTC
$5 19 1-7 * 4 /usr/local/bin/rust-wipe.sh full >> /var/log/rust-wipe.log 2>&1

$#!/usr/bin/env bash
$set -euo pipefail
$
$MODE=${1:-map}
$SAVE_DIR=/home/rust/server/rust_server/save123
$
$systemctl stop rustserver
$rm -f "${SAVE_DIR}"/*.map "${SAVE_DIR}"/*.sav "${SAVE_DIR}"/*.sav.*
$if [ "${MODE}" = "full" ]; then
$  rm -f "${SAVE_DIR}"/player.blueprints.5.db
$fi
$systemctl start rustserver

Picking the next map seed and size

Many servers rotate the procedural seed on every wipe to keep the world fresh. Set the seed and size in the server startup line, and announce both in your Discord so players can pre-load the map in Rust Map.

$+server.seed   1234567
$+server.worldsize 3500
$+server.maxplayers 150
$+server.identity  save123

Worldsize is in meters. The common range is 3000 for small servers, 3500 for a balanced map, and 4250+ for large groups. Anything above 4500 starts to hurt navmesh performance and Helicopter spawn density.

Announcing the wipe over RCON

A friendly admin script pings the server on a schedule with a countdown so players are not blindsided.

$#!/usr/bin/env bash
$# Requires rcon-cli (https://github.com/gorcon/rcon-cli)
$RCON_HOST=127.0.0.1
$RCON_PORT=28016
$RCON_PASS=REPLACE_ME
$
$say() {
$  rcon-cli -a "${RCON_HOST}:${RCON_PORT}" -p "${RCON_PASS}" "say $1"
$}
$
$say "Wipe in 60 minutes. Stash your skins."
$sleep 1800
$say "Wipe in 30 minutes."
$sleep 1500
$say "Wipe in 5 minutes. Disconnect now to avoid TC loss."

Ready to spin up the server itself? Walk through Deploying a Vanilla Rust Server via LinuxGSM, then come back here to wire up the wipe schedule.