Rust server configuration and the wipe calendar

Rust is the only major game where the calendar is part of the server configuration. Facepunch forces a wipe on the first Thursday of each month when the protocol version changes, and every decision about your server either works with that rhythm or fights it.

Facepunch's own guide to creating a server covers the mechanics. The scheduling is the part that decides whether anyone stays.

Forced wipes are not optional

When the protocol version changes, existing blueprints and map data become incompatible. That is not a policy you can configure around: the server will not load the old data.

So the first Thursday is fixed. What you choose is everything else: whether you wipe more often, whether blueprints survive a map wipe, and what you do with the two weeks after.

The two wipes people confuse

A map wipe regenerates the world. Everything built is gone.

A blueprint wipe resets what players have learned. Doing both is a full reset; doing only the map is a "map-only wipe", and the difference decides who your server is for.

Map-only wipes favour returning players, who keep their progression and rebuild quickly. Full wipes favour newcomers, because everybody starts level. A server that runs full wipes monthly and wonders why it has no regulars has answered that question without noticing, and a server that never does a blueprint wipe becomes impenetrable to anyone arriving in week three.

Neither is wrong. Choosing without knowing which one you chose is.

The seed and the size, together

server.seed fixes the map, server.worldsize sets its dimensions. A larger map spreads players out, which lowers conflict and raises the distance to anything interesting.

The common error is a 4500-size map for a server that peaks at fifteen players. Those fifteen people will not meet each other, and Rust with nobody in it is a walking simulator. Map size should follow your realistic peak, not your ambition: the same arithmetic as slot counts everywhere else.

Changing the seed mid-wipe-cycle is a map wipe whether you meant it or not.

The decay settings that decide the second week

decay.scale controls how fast unmaintained structures fall apart. At 1 a base needs regular upkeep; at 0 nothing decays and the map fills with abandoned bases that never clear.

Servers that set decay to zero to be friendly discover the consequence in week two: every good location is occupied by a base whose owner stopped playing on day three, and new players have nowhere to build. The map is full and the server is empty.

Decay is what makes room for the next person. It reads as hostile and it is the opposite.

Plugins and the monthly breakage

Oxide-based plugins break on forced-wipe day with some regularity, because the game update that changes the protocol also changes the APIs plugins call.

This is predictable, which makes it manageable: expect to spend the first Thursday updating rather than playing, keep a list of which plugins you depend on, and know which of them have maintainers who update promptly. A server that depends on fifteen plugins from five authors has five independent chances of being broken on the same evening, and that fragility is worth counting before it is worth complaining about.

Take a copy of the server directory before the update rather than after. A wipe day is the one evening a month where a bad plugin update and a legitimate data reset look identical from the outside, and a backup taken beforehand is the only thing that tells them apart.

The schedule that actually retains people

The pattern that works is the one people can plan around: a fixed day, announced in advance, the same every month. Players organise their week around it and arrive together.

The pattern that does not is wiping whenever the admin feels the server has gone stale. It is defensible on every individual occasion and it teaches players that their base has an unknown expiry date, which is the fastest way to stop them building anything worth defending.

This is a community-management question wearing a config file, and it sits next to the rest of what keeps a community together through a reset rather than in the server settings at all.

The wipe that is not on the calendar

The monthly force wipe is the one everybody plans around. The one that catches server owners is the update that changes the map protocol outside the schedule, because it arrives without warning and produces the same effect.

When that happens the options are all bad: run an outdated server that new clients cannot join, wipe off-cycle and break whatever the community was building toward, or stay down until it resolves. There is no fourth option, and choosing quickly matters more than choosing correctly.

What makes it survivable is having said in advance what the server does in that situation. A community that was told at launch that an unscheduled protocol change means an immediate wipe will grumble. A community that finds out when it happens concludes the owner decided arbitrarily, and the second is a much more expensive conversation.

It is one line in the same document as the wipe schedule, and it is the line that only matters on the day nothing else helps.

What to write down before launch

Wipe day and wipe type. Map size and seed policy. Decay scale. Plugin list with authors. Where the announcement goes.

Five lines, agreed once, published where players can read them. The servers that survive their third month are not the ones with the best settings: they are the ones where the settings stopped changing, which is the same stability that separates a server people commit to from one that is quietly emptying.