How to pick a Rust wipe (and never miss one)

The best moment to join a Rust server is the first one to three hours after it wipes: everyone starts with a rock, nobody has raided yet, and the map is full. Everything in this guide is about being there at that moment instead of arriving on day three of someone else's wipe.

• Map wipe: the world resets (bases, loot, deployables, map seed). You keep your blueprints.
  
• BP wipe: learned blueprints reset too. Everybody is back to crafting stone tools.
  
• Full wipe: map and blueprints at the same time. The true level playing field.

Force wipe is the monthly event on the first Thursday of every month at 19:00 UK time (18:00 UTC in summer, 19:00 UTC in winter; 2 PM US Eastern). Facepunch ships the monthly update and every server in the world wipes its map. Blueprints only go if the server has a BP wipe scheduled or Facepunch announces a global one (rare, and always in the patch notes).
Live countdown and every force wipe date through next year: https://wipeboard.net/force-wipe

• Weekly (most modded 2x to 10x servers, many vanilla "Thursday" servers): great if you have a few evenings. You're never more than a week from a fresh start.
  
• Biweekly (a lot of vanilla and "official-style" servers): room to build something real without a month of grind.
  
• Monthly / force-only: for big builds, big groups, and people who enjoy late-wipe mega-raids.
  
• Every 2 to 4 days: 5x to 10x servers where the whole wipe is a sprint. Perfect for one long session.

Across ~9,500 servers online today, Thursday is by far the most common wipe day (a third of all declared weekly wipes), followed by Friday. That is why Thursday evening is the busiest night in Rust. Live numbers: https://wipeboard.net/stats

Every server shows its wipe schedule on BattleMetrics, but there are two kinds:

• Owner-declared: the admin typed it in (day, hour, timezone, map or BP). Reliable.
  
• Detected: inferred from past wipes. Usually right for weekly servers, often wrong for irregular ones.

Only about 1 in 10 published schedules is owner-declared. If a server's "next wipe" time has passed and the map hasn't changed, the schedule was wrong, so don't sit in a queue waiting for it. (Wipe Board marks these as "due, not yet seen" in red so you can tell.)
Also check the server's own timezone: a "19:00 wipe" on a Texas server is 01:00 in Berlin. Most community servers wipe between 14:00 and 20:00 in their local time so they're full when people get home.

A decent wipe-day routine:

• The night before: pick two or three candidate servers with a wipe in your play window. Star them.
  
• Wipe minute: servers go down when the update/wipe lands and come back within 5 to 30 minutes. Have the client.connect ip:port line ready in the F1 console; the server browser is slow and full of queue.
  
• First 10 minutes: run inland from the beach, don't fight, grab a stone hatchet and 3 wood walls' worth of materials before the first base spot. Population peaks in the first three hours, then halves over the next several. Your first hour decides your wipe.
  
• If you only have an hour or two: prefer a server that wiped in the last hour on a 2x to 5x rate, not the 3-day-old vanilla map.

Don't want to plan? Answer three questions and get the five best servers to join right now, scored on how fresh the wipe is, whether a wipe starts inside your window, population and schedule trust: https://wipeboard.net/tonight

The numbers above come from Wipe Board (https://wipeboard.net), a free tracker I run that lists every online Rust server worldwide that just wiped or is about to, with the owner-declared vs detected labels, a force wipe countdown, per-server pages with map and schedule, and the alerts above. No ads, no paid listings, no account. Data from BattleMetrics, refreshed every few minutes. Not affiliated with Facepunch.

If you found this useful, a rate-up helps other players find it, and tell me in the comments which server you're wiping on.