A Rust wipe day checklist for operators

When the forced wipe actually happens#

Facepunch's wipe timer documentation gives the defaults in plain terms:

• Monthly: "First Thursday every month at 19:00 (London time)".
• Weekly: "Every Thursday at 19:00 (London time)".
• Biweekly: "First and third Thursday of each month at 19:00 (London time)", splitting three-week gaps into 2+1 for months with five weeks.

That schedule is not just a calendar note — it drives the in-game countdown at the Nuclear Missile Silo, which the wiki describes as "counting down until the next server wipe". Your players read that timer. If it disagrees with your announcements, they will trust the timer.

The timer is built from your wipe tag plus three convars: wipetimer.wipeTimezone, wipetimer.wipeDayofWeek and wipetimer.wipeHourofDay. Day of week runs 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday), with 4 (Thursday) as the default; the hour is 24-hour format and accepts halves, so wipeHourofDay 14.5 is read as 2:30 PM. The default timezone is Europe/London.

For an exact one-off date there are two overrides: wipetimer.wipeUnixTimestampOverride, which "will override all other settings for the wipe timer" and is ignored if the timestamp is already in the past, and wipetimer.wipecronoverride for a cron expression — the wiki's example +wipeCronOverride "0 14 1-7,15-21 * 4" wipes the first and third Thursday at 2 PM.

Verify the timer instead of trusting it#

The wiki gives you a check, and it takes ten seconds: run PrintWipe in the console. It prints the frequency, timezone, wipe day, wipe hour, the calculated wipe time, time remaining, the cron expression in use, and the next ten occurrences.

Do this before you announce anything. Reading the next ten dates out of your own server is more reliable than any third-party wipe calendar, and it catches the single most common wipe-day embarrassment: a server whose clock or timezone is set wrong. Facepunch's own advice on the page is exactly that — "Make sure the time is set correctly on your servers!"

The day before the wipe: endgame events#

Rust runs two events in the last 24 hours of a wipe cycle, and if you do not know about them you will read them as a bug. The wiki: "On the last day of (24 hours before) every wipe cycle, the server will start two endgame events."

• F-15E Strike Eagle Inbound — jets observing the island. Loud, and with "no direct impact on game play".
• Road Bradleys — more scientists, plus Bradley APCs "roaming on random roads, attacking anything they spot". The count scales with map size: WorldSize / 1000 × 2.

The window is adjustable with eventschedulewipeoffset.event_hours_before_wipe, and setting it to 0 disables it. Tell your players these are coming. "Why is there a jet" is a support question you can prevent with one announcement.

Map wipe, blueprint wipe, full wipe#

Three different things get called "wipe", and being sloppy about which one you mean is how communities lose progression they expected to keep.

• Map wipe. A new world is generated. Buildings and deployables are gone; learned blueprints are not necessarily touched.
• Blueprint wipe. Player progression resets too. This is the one that changes how the first week plays.
• Full wipe. Both, together — the closest thing to a fresh server.

The new map itself comes from two documented settings: +server.seed, which "sets the random seed for how the map is generated" and accepts any value from 0 to 2147483647, and +server.worldsize, where a larger map needs more disk space and more of the machine, and the usable range is 1000 to 6000. Pick both before wipe day, not during it, and post the seed and size with the announcement — a chunk of your players choose which server to join on exactly that.

One honest caution about files. Facepunch documents where a server's data lives — everything sits under the folder named by +server.identity, so an identity of "server1" creates a server1 directory "for all of your server files" — but it does not publish a canonical list of which files to delete for each kind of wipe, and the answer differs between hosts and versions. Guides that hand you an exact delete list are usually describing one host's layout. Ask your host what their wipe action removes, and take a copy of the identity folder before anything is deleted. That copy is the whole insurance policy.

Prepare plugins before you announce#

Rust updates on force-wipe day, and plugins break on Rust updates. The order that works:

1. Write down every plugin you run and its version, the week before.
2. On update day, expect a wave of plugin releases within hours. Do not restart into the new build with yesterday's plugins and hope.
3. Update by overwriting: uMod's documentation says to overwrite the original .cs file in oxide/plugins and the new version will be loaded, and warns "Do not rename the plugin or change the file extension."
4. Start the server private, confirm each plugin loaded without errors in the console, then open it.

Keep plugin config and data files separate in your head from the plugin itself. A wipe that clears data files resets things like economy balances and stored player state — sometimes intended, often not. Decide which of those you meant to reset before the wipe rather than explaining it after.

Wipe day itself#

1. Announce the exact time and timezone, twice: several days ahead and on the day. Use the same time your PrintWipe output shows.
2. Take and verify a copy of the identity folder before you touch anything.
3. Stop the server cleanly and wait for it to finish saving.
4. Apply the wipe, set the new seed and world size, and update plugins.
5. Start it, watch the whole startup log, and check the server appears in the browser under the tags you expect.
6. Join it yourself before you tell anyone it is up.

Then post the seed, the size, the wipe schedule and the next wipe date in the same message. Wipe day is when players go shopping for a server, and being the one that says exactly what it is doing is most of the pitch. Our Rust availability page lists the plans we currently run.

Where RadarHost fits#

RadarHost rents game servers hosted in Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada, priced in Canadian dollars, with no setup fee and cancel any time. Sixteen games are listed in Standard, Premium and Diamond plans — Minecraft (Paper, Forge or Vanilla), Rust, ARK: Survival Evolved, Garry's Mod, Terraria, Valheim, Palworld, Enshrouded, Satisfactory, Factorio, Project Zomboid, 7 Days to Die, DayZ, Conan Exiles, Arma 3 and SCUM. Counter-Strike 2 and every other title are request-only and are never priced in advance. After payment, our team reviews the order and emails setup details or next steps within 24 hours. Rust prices for all three tiers are on the plans section.