Rust’s wipe calendar is the one system every player is subject to and almost nobody has read the documentation for. The site already covers the October Livestock patch and what it did to early-wipe air access and the ranching work on the dev branch. Neither answers this question: when the calendar resets the map, what else goes with it, and how should that change the first six hours and the last twenty-four?
This guide is about the timer, not the patch. Mechanical statements come from Facepunch’s wiki and changelists; hosting documentation and Rustafied cover the operator side, where Facepunch publishes no policy.
What this covers: the monthly forced wipe, what it does and does not reset, how blueprint carry-over differs between server types, a first-six-hours order of operations, and why the end of a cycle punishes raiders. Why it matters: a forced wipe resets the map for every server at once, but blueprints only reset if a server operator chooses to reset them — and that choice is not visible in the server browser’s wipe tag. Who should care: anyone choosing a server for a month, solo players who need their blueprints to survive a weekly map cycle, and groups deciding when in a cycle a raid is actually worth the explosives.
What this assumes: the live build as of 29 October 2026 — the Halloween Patch of 22 October 2026 sitting on top of the October Patch (“Livestock Update”) of 1 October 2026, per Facepunch’s changelist index. Nothing here describes the staging or development branches.
What a wipe actually resets
The distinction that matters is between the reset Facepunch forces and the resets a server owner performs. The Facepunch-hosted Rust wiki is explicit that the monthly event is a map wipe:
“Generally it only happens with the sav file because they only force a map wipe. If you wanted to force a blueprint wipe you would need to delete the blueprints file at the same time.”
That sentence sits in the page’s explanation of the number in a save file’s name: a protocol version that increments at a forced wipe, which is why an old save cannot simply be loaded back in. The same page lists player.blueprints as the file that “stores your players blueprints”.
So a forced wipe is not one reset switch. It is one reset, plus a set of separate files a server owner may or may not delete.
| What resets | Who does it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The map and every entity on it | Facepunch, forced | Protocol version bump; old save will not load |
| Blueprints | Server owner, optional | Requires deleting the blueprint file |
| Player state (death markers, hostile timer) | File-dependent | Stored separately from the map |
| Server-side plugin data (kits, homes, playtime) | Server owner | Third-party plugins, their own config |
The hosting knowledge base at The Scrap Yard describes the same split from the operator’s side: a map wipe means deleting the Save/ directory, while a map-plus-blueprint wipe means deleting Save/ and the Player.blueprints.*.db files. Its own summary of the blueprint step is one line: “Reset all unlocked blueprints. Optional.”
The force wipe is a date, not a time you can guess
Two independent sources give the same anchor. Facepunch’s wipe-timer documentation states the default for a monthly-tagged server is “First Thursday every month at 19:00 (London time)”, and adds that “the default configuration aligns with force wipes so it shouldn’t need any changing for most people”. Rustafied’s server page puts it plainly: “There is a forced wipe in the game the first Thursday of each month.”
The pattern holds in Facepunch’s own publishing history: every monthly devblog on the news index landed on a Thursday — 1 October, 3 September, 6 August, 2 July, 4 June and 7 May 2026. The Halloween post, dated 22 October, is the exception, because it is an event patch rather than the month’s update.
Two caveats matter before you plan around it.
The first is that the force-wipe time and your server’s wipe time are different things. Rustafied, which runs many public servers, states that its “US servers wipe at 3pm EST on wipe days (except on forced wipes)”, with matching local-time statements for EU, AU and SEA. A weekly server’s map wipe hour is a server setting, not a Facepunch one; the timer page documents the convars that decide it, and a server can override the schedule entirely with a Unix timestamp or a cron expression.
The second is that “19:00 London time” is not a fixed UTC offset. The Halloween post flags the UK clock change — “we’ll be moving from BST to GMT” — and warns players to “keep an eye out for any client and server announcements that may be time dependant.” After that switch, 19:00 in London is 19:00 UTC; before it, 18:00 UTC. A guide written in summer is an hour out.
The next first Thursday after publication is 5 November 2026. Facepunch’s own event calendar points at the same day from the other direction: the Halloween event “will run until November 5th.”
Blueprint carry-over, by server type
Rust’s server browser does carry a wipe tag, and it is a three-value field. The tags documentation defines a “Wipe Schedule” group containing exactly monthly, biweekly and weekly, set through the server.tags convar, and warns operators not to specify more than one tag from the same group.
There is no blueprint tag. The browser tells you how often the map changes and nothing about whether your progress survives it. The practical rules come from how operators configure servers — the gap hosting documentation fills.
| Server type | Map cadence | Blueprint cadence | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly map cycle, vanilla | Every Thursday | At the forced wipe only | Blueprints carry across three or four map resets a month |
| Biweekly map cycle | Every other Thursday | At the forced wipe only | Same carry-over, longer runway per map |
| Monthly cycle | Forced wipe only | At the forced wipe | Map and blueprints reset together |
| Blueprint-disabled | Weekly | Not applicable | Everything unlocked by design; tech progression is not the game |
| Hardcore monthly | Forced wipe only | At the forced wipe | No safety net between cycles |
The left and middle columns are the patterns published in The Scrap Yard’s Rust knowledge base, which lists five common configurations in exactly this shape and states that “most servers BP-wipe monthly with the force.” The right-hand column is the consequence, not a separate claim.
The first row is the case people get wrong. On a weekly-tagged server, Thursday does not mean your tech tree resets. Scrap, workbenches, learned items and everything you researched stay in the blueprint file while the map is replaced underneath them. Someone joining that server on the second Thursday of a month inherits a lobby where everyone else already knows the recipes, and they are catching up against a progression curve that does not restart with the terrain.
Rustafied’s own server list runs weekly, biweekly and monthly cycles side by side, and several of its monthly servers say they wipe “only when forced.”
The first six hours, in the order that matters
Wipe day compresses every decision. The sequence below follows documented mechanics in the order the clock forces them on you.
Hour zero to one: decide the base’s population before you place the cupboard. Since the September “Breach and Clear” update, tool cupboards apply an upkeep tax based on how many players are attached to the base. The devblog sets out the tiers: “First 4 players incur no tax”, the “next 6 players incur 2% tax per player”, and “Subsequent players incur 4% tax per player”, capped at 300%.
The counting rule is broader than the auth list: it includes anyone authed on the TC, anyone deauthed from it in the last 24 hours, anyone authed on a code lock in the base including guest access, and anyone deauthed from a code lock in the last 24 hours. On wipe day, when door codes are handed out and swapped repeatedly, that 24-hour tail is live — a base designed for eight can be paying for twelve.
Hour one to three: the monument loot you want is behind a wall. Monument blockers arrived in the same September patch. Facepunch describes them as “a new obstacle we’re adding to monuments with red keycard puzzle rooms”, intended “to slow down early access to the loot at these monuments”. They “require a significant amount of damage to destroy but once destroyed they won’t respawn”, and “in the event they aren’t destroyed within the first 24 hours, they will start to decay.”
For a first-six-hours plan that is a scheduling problem, not a damage problem. The blockers do not regenerate, so whoever breaks one opens that monument for everyone. On a populated server the efficient move is often to arrive after someone else has done the demolition and take the loot room while the crowd is elsewhere.
Hour two to four: check the Air Wolf pad before you plan air travel. The 1 October patch changed the Bandit Camp vendor. Facepunch’s changelist states that “Air Wolf vendor at Bandit Camp will no longer sell air vehicles until their helipad has been repaired”, and the Livestock devblog describes the repair as a resource transfer performed by bashing the pad with a hammer, in the same style as building siegesiege. A timed, large-scale attack on a settlement — attackers try to destroy it, defenders try to hold it. weapons. The published resource totals are not in the devblog — the figures in this site’s coverage of that patch come from Facepunch’s commits, and they are a group-scale bill.
Hour three to six: power, not property. The October changelist includes two lines that change the mid-session routine on smaller servers: “Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing”, and Power Plant heavy fuse decay now “scales based on server population - last 4x4X. eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate — a grand-strategy subgenre about building a civilization over a long arc. longer with 10 or lower players, same lifespan as before at 100 or greater players.” The powergrid loot rooms added across many monuments in the same patch stay locked until enough fuses are in the plant. On a low-population server that fuse window is four times wider than it used to be.
If you are playing before 5 November: the Halloween event competes with all of the above. Facepunch describes a Candy Hunt that begins “once roughly every two in-game days”, giving players “3 minutes to collect as much candy as you can” with loot bags for the top three — a scheduled interruption with a resource reward.
Why raid timing beats base design
Base design is an optimisation problem with a stable answer. Raid timing is a decision problem whose answer changes with the date, and most players evaluate it against the wrong clock.
Two things make the end of a cycle different from the start.
The first is Facepunch’s endgame scheduling. The wipe-timer documentation states that “on the last day of (24 hours before) every wipe cycle, the server will start two endgame events”, adjustable through eventschedulewipeoffset.event_hours_before_wipe and disabled by setting that to 0. One is an F-15E flyover, which the page says “has no direct impact on game play”. The other is not cosmetic: “Scientists on island will be increased, and Bradley APCs will start roaming on random roads, attacking anything they spot.” The number of APCs is set by map size, with the page giving the formula as WorldSize divided by 1000, multiplied by 2.
That is a route-planning fact before it is a combat fact. For the final day of a cycle, roads carry hostile armour that is not there the rest of the month, so a raid planned around road movement has a different risk profile from the same raid three weeks earlier. The same timer is visible in the world: the page notes that the countdown terminal at the bottom of the Nuclear Missile Silo, labelled “REPOPULATION UNIT SURVIVAL TEST”, counts to the next wipe.
The second is what a raid can and cannot take. Blueprints live in the player file, not in the base. Breaking into a compound gets you items, resources and workbenches; it does not transfer learned recipes, because those are not stored on the map. Raiding is worth most when the target has accumulated physical stock — late in a cycle — and least at the very start, when the base you just blew open holds a sleeping bag and four hundred wood.
Put those together and the arithmetic changes twice in a cycle. In the first six hours a raid costs more than the target holds. In the last twenty-four, targets are full, defenders are tired, and the roads are patrolled by Bradleys that shoot at whoever they see. The window with the best value is usually the days before the endgame events trigger, not the final night.
A third consideration decides whether any of this is worth doing: whether the server wipes blueprints at the force. On a server that BP-wipes monthly, everything you strip from a base has a shelf life measured in days, so the correct late-cycle play is to spend resources rather than store them. On one that has preserved blueprints through three map wipes, loot is valued against a progression that is not going anywhere.
What changes next, and what is unconfirmed
The live build is the Halloween Patch of 22 October 2026. A much larger blueprint change is in development and is not live: Rustafied’s 29 October report describes a “blueprint progression overhaul, which will replace scrap with Blueprint Fragments, Pages, and Books for unlocking technologies through the tech tree”, with loot percentages still moving and the explicit note that “all of this is still being balanced ahead of release.” Nothing here assumes it has shipped; re-check any blueprint-carry plan when it does.
Two things stay unconfirmed rather than guessed.
Facepunch does not publish a blueprint-wipe policy for its own official servers in any of the pages reviewed here. That the forced wipe is a map wipe is documented; what any specific operator, including Facepunch, does with the blueprint file is not. Check the server’s own description and Discord rather than inferring a policy from its wipe tag.
Facepunch also does not publish one canonical wipe hour in UTC. The wiki gives 19:00 Europe/London as the timer default; hosting documentation describes the force wipe as “1 PM EST”; the two describe the same instant only in summer, while London is on BST. Convert from the London setting, and verify against the server you play on.