What Survives a Rust Wipe?
Your Steam inventory, skins and total playtime always survive a Rust wipe. Bases, stored items and map progress never do. Blueprints depend on the wipe: a normal map wipe keeps them, a full wipe clears them, and a force wipe clears them only when Facepunch forces a blueprint wipe or the server chooses to.
Editorial — Written and reviewed by the WipeDay team.
New players often assume a wipe deletes everything including things they paid for. It does not, and the distinction is worth understanding before your first one.
Always survives. Everything attached to your Steam account is untouched. Skins you bought, traded for or earned stay in your inventory permanently. Your hours played, your Steam achievements and anything in the Steam marketplace are account-level and completely outside the game world. A wipe cannot take them.
Never survives. Everything that exists in the game world is gone. Your base, every box and its contents, your tool cupboard, sleeping bags, deployables, vehicles and anything on your character. The map itself is regenerated, so even the terrain you knew will be different. There is no storage in Rust that persists across a wipe — that is the fundamental design of the game.
Depends on the wipe. Blueprints are the variable. A force wipe on the first Thursday clears them only in the months Facepunch forces a blueprint wipe, or on servers that choose to wipe blueprints that day. A server's own map wipe normally keeps them, so you log in after the wipe still knowing how to craft what you researched. A full wipe, which some owners run deliberately, clears them. Server descriptions usually state which one they run.
On modded servers there is one more category. Some servers store custom progression — kits, ranks, in-game currency, permission groups — in their own plugin database rather than in Rust's save file. Whether that survives is entirely up to the server owner's configuration. Ask in their Discord rather than assuming.
The practical takeaway for planning: never treat a base as long-term storage. Spend your resources. Materials sitting in a box the night before a force wipe are wasted, while the same materials spent on explosives for one last raid are not. Experienced players deliberately empty out before a wipe.
And there is an upside to wipes that people forget. A force wipe puts every map back to zero at the same moment. A group that spent a month building an unassailable position starts the new cycle with exactly what you have. For a solo or small group, force wipe day is the fairest day of the month.
| Thing | Force wipe | Map wipe |
|---|---|---|
| Skins and Steam inventory | Survives | Survives |
| Hours played, achievements | Survives | Survives |
| Blueprints | Only when forced or chosen | Usually kept |
| Base and everything stored | Gone | Gone |
| Map layout | Regenerated | Regenerated |