When and how to wipe

What a wipe means

A wipe in Rust means clearing player progress and starting over. It's how the game works: Facepunch ships an update on the first Thursday of every month, every large server wipes that day, and some servers wipe weekly on top of that.

A wipe isn't a fault or a punishment. It's what keeps a server alive. Without it the map fills with abandoned bases within two months and nobody can build.

Two kinds of wipe

Map wipe: the map and everything built on it are deleted and your server generates a new map. The blueprints players unlocked stay with them, so they rebuild fast. This is the usual monthly wipe.

Full wipe: everything is deleted, including the map, the buildings, the blueprints and the player data. Everyone starts from a rock. Most servers do this every two or three months, or when they first open.

How to run one

The Controls tab has a wipe section with two buttons.

1. Pick the kind of wipe and read the confirmation
2. We warn the players who are online and stop your server
3. With the server stopped, and before anything is deleted, we take a backup ourselves, listed in your backups as "Before the content change"
4. We clear it, and it comes back on its own with a new map only if it was running

A wipe is only undone from that backup, so keep it until you're sure everything is fine.

Want a specific map?

If you like a map, pin the Map seed and the Map size in the settings tab before the wipe and you get the same map back exactly. If you want a fresh map every month, change the seed to any number before you wipe.