What Time Is Rust Force Wipe? UK, CEST, and Why the Hour Drifts

The next Rust force wipe is Thursday, September 3, 2026, the first Thursday of the month, live as soon as the update ships (expect 20:00 to 21:00 CEST). Force wipe is the one wipe no running server can skip. On the first Thursday of every month, Facepunch ships the monthly client and server update, and that patch makes old map data incompatible with the new build. Every server that is up, official and community alike, has to generate a fresh map. The eight RustFront servers are offline for maintenance, so they are out of the cycle until they come back.

The timing comes from the official Facepunch wiki: the default server wipe timer fires at 19:00 London time (Europe/London). Because the timer is anchored to London rather than UTC, the UK wall-clock hour never moves, 19:00 in summer and 19:00 in winter, and Central Europe gets 20:00 all year round.

Everything on the map goes with it: bases, tool cupboards, deployables, stashed loot, inventories and sleepers. If you want the full breakdown of which wipe type takes what, see our force wipe vs blueprint wipe vs map wipe guide.

Convert from 19:00 UK, not from a fixed UTC hour. Some wipe sites quote a flat '19:00 UTC', which is wrong for half the year, because during British Summer Time 19:00 London is 18:00 UTC. If a page gives you a UTC hour without mentioning London time, treat it with suspicion.

Here is the default wipe-timer moment in the timezones people actually search for:

• UK: 19:00 (Europe/London), the Facepunch wiki's default wipe timer, same wall-clock hour year-round
• Central Europe: 20:00 CEST in summer, 20:00 CET in winter, so 20:00 Berlin time all year, and the canonical RustFront force-wipe moment on the published schedule
• US Eastern: around 2 PM, also the window when the monthly update itself typically deploys (18:00 to 19:00 UTC depending on daylight saving)

The 19:00 London timer is a default setting, not a launch event. A force wipe cannot actually finish until Facepunch publishes the monthly update, and that update deploys around 2 PM US Eastern, which is 18:00 to 19:00 UTC depending on daylight saving. The precise hour shifts slightly from patch to patch.

Server owners then have to pull the new build, update the server and bring it back up on a fresh map. That pipeline is why RustFront publishes force wipe as '1st Thursday of each month, 20:00 CEST' while telling players the real moment lands between 20:00 and 21:00 CEST. The schedule is fixed; the final hour belongs to Facepunch. That cadence resumes when the RustFront servers come back from maintenance.

If you would rather watch reality than a clock, /wipelist shows live wipe status, so you can see the moment a server actually comes back fresh. While the RustFront fleet is offline for maintenance the page reports that instead of a countdown.

On a normal cycle all eight servers reset on force-wipe Thursday: EU Main, EU Solo, EU Trio, EU Weekend, EU Monday, EU Small, EU Monthly and EU 2x all start a fresh map, and it is the one day the entire fleet wipes together. That shared reset is paused while the servers are offline for maintenance, and it comes back with them.

The Thursday-wiping servers fold their weekly wipe into it. EU Trio normally wipes Thursday 12:00, EU Solo 14:00 and EU Main 17:00 CEST, and on force-wipe Thursday those slots are skipped so the 20:00 force wipe can replace them. One wipe that day, not two.

For EU Monthly, force wipe is the only wipe it ever gets. There is no weekly map wipe on that server, so the monthly force wipe defines its entire cycle: a full month of building on one map.

One thing that is not a wipe: the daily restart. When the network is up, every RustFront server restarts around 05:00 Berlin time each morning, and your base, loot and blueprints are untouched while the server goes down briefly and comes back. The stretch the fleet is in now is the longer maintenance kind, so the servers stay down until the work is finished.

Blueprint behaviour at force wipe changed recently, and a lot of older guides have not caught up. Before November 2025, blueprints survived force wipes by default; Facepunch only cleared them in occasional global BP wipes.

Since the November 2025 update, official Facepunch servers wipe blueprints at every monthly force wipe. Community servers still choose their own policy: the forced monthly BP wipe applies only to officials. Rustafied covered the change on October 30, 2025.

RustFront sets blueprints to wipe on the same first-Thursday schedule: 1st Thursday of each month, 20:00 CEST. So force-wipe Thursday is a genuinely blank slate here, fresh map, fresh blueprints, everyone starting from stone tools at the same moment. That is what the servers come back to after the maintenance window.