Operations5 min read
Rust wipes without losing your players
What forced wipes actually force, how to schedule the rest, and why announcing a wipe badly costs more players than the wipe does.
Rust forces a map wipe on the first Thursday of every month, when the protocol changes and old saves stop loading. Everything else - blueprints, the schedule in between - is yours to decide, and deciding it badly is what empties a server.
Map wipe and BP wipe are different
A map wipe resets the world and everything built on it. A blueprint wipe resets what players have learned. Forced wipes are map wipes; whether blueprints go with them is your call, and it is the single biggest lever on how a server feels. Keeping BPs makes returning cheap. Wiping them makes everyone equal and makes the first week the whole point.
Schedule it, then say it out loud
- Pick a cadence and keep it - weekly, biweekly, or monthly with the force.
- Put the next wipe date in the server name. It is the only place most players will read it.
- Announce it in-game a day ahead, not an hour.
- Take a backup before the wipe, because 'wipe' and 'wiped the wrong thing' look identical afterwards.
The Schedules tab can run the wipe for you at a fixed time, which matters more than it sounds: a wipe that happens when you happen to be awake is a wipe your players cannot plan around.