How to Schedule Wipes and Blueprint Resets on Your Rust Server
Plan your Rust server wipe cadence around forced monthly updates, configure map resets, and manage blueprint wipes from the MANAfuel dashboard.
Understand Forced vs Custom Wipes
Rust has two wipe types. Forced wipes happen on the first Thursday of every month when Facepunch pushes a mandatory update — every server worldwide resets its map. Custom wipes are your choice: you decide when to wipe the map, whether to wipe blueprints, and what seed to use. MANAfuel handles forced wipes automatically — your server updates to the latest Rust build and generates a fresh map on the correct Thursday without any action from you.
Plan Your Wipe Cadence
Most competitive Rust communities wipe weekly or biweekly. Casual servers often run monthly, aligning with the forced wipe. Decide what fits your community and announce the schedule in your server description. A common pattern is a biweekly map wipe with a monthly blueprint wipe on forced wipe day. Whatever you choose, consistency matters — players pick servers based on wipe predictability.
Create a Pre-Wipe Save Point
Before any wipe, open your server panel in the MANAfuel dashboard and create a manual save point. This captures your current world state, player blueprints, and all configuration files. If anything goes wrong during the wipe — wrong seed, accidental blueprint wipe, plugin misconfiguration — you can restore from this save point and retry. MANAfuel keeps 14 save points on your schedule, so manual saves before major events are always worth the 10 seconds they take.
Wipe the Map
Open the File Manager tab in your server panel. Navigate to the server data directory and delete the map files (*.map and *.sav files). When you restart the server, Rust generates a fresh map using the configured seed and world size. Alternatively, change the server seed in your server settings to get a different map layout. The server picks up the new seed on the next restart and generates the corresponding terrain.
Handle Blueprint Wipes
Blueprint wipes reset all player progression — tech trees, workbenches, and learned items. To wipe blueprints, delete the player data files from the server data directory using the File Manager. Blueprint wipes are more disruptive than map wipes, so most servers only do them monthly on forced wipe day. If you run a weekly-wipe server, consider keeping blueprints between wipes to reduce the grind for returning players.
Configure Post-Wipe Settings
After a wipe, verify your server configuration. Open the RCON Console and check your server name, description, and max players. Update the server description to reflect the new wipe date so players in the server browser know when the next wipe is. If you run plugins like Gather Manager or custom loot tables, confirm they loaded correctly — Bob scans your plugin list on every restart and flags any that failed to load.
Monitor Wipe Day Performance
Wipe day is the highest-traffic event for any Rust server. Your server panel shows real-time CPU, memory, and player count metrics. MANAfuel servers run on premium AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D hardware, so tick rate stays stable even at peak load. If Bob detects performance degradation during wipe day, he surfaces it in your notifications with specific metrics — which resource is the bottleneck and what you can do about it.