Rust Oxide plugins and the wipe scheduler explained

Install Oxide and Carbon plugins from the dashboard and run map plus blueprint wipes on the schedule your community expects.

Rust Oxide plugins and the wipe scheduler are the two systems most communities live and die by. The dashboard handles both: a plugin browser pulling from uMod, and a wipe scheduler with separate cadences for map wipes and blueprint wipes.

Installing Oxide plugins from uMod

In the dashboard, open your Rust server, then Plugins. The browser hits uMod live, with sort options (popular, recently updated, name) and pagination so you're not scrolling forever. Click Install on a plugin and it drops into oxide/plugins/ and loads on the next plugin reload (no full restart needed for most).

A few that almost every community ends up running: Kits for starter loadouts and VIP perks, ZoneManager for safe zones around shops and events, BetterChat for tag and colour management, and Vanish so admins can investigate without poisoning the wipe. Plenty of others are worth a look depending on your style: economy stacks, raid alerts, custom monuments.

There's a 40-plugin cap per server. This is deliberate. Past 40, the chance of one plugin throwing on a Rust update, a plugin loop chewing tick time, or two plugins fighting over the same hook goes up sharply. If you're hitting the cap, audit before you ask for more.

Carbon as an alternative loader

Carbon is a separate mod loader some plugin authors target instead of, or alongside, Oxide. We overlay Carbon on the container, so plugins that need it work without you wiring anything up. If you're not sure which to use, Oxide is the safe default; the wider plugin ecosystem still lives on uMod. Reach for Carbon when a plugin you want explicitly requires it.

Editing server.cfg for the rest

Plugins cover most live-tuning, but some knobs live in server.cfg. Things like server.tags, server.description, server.url, server.headerimage, decay rates that aren't plugin-controlled, and any oxide config that wants a persistent override. Open the Files tab, navigate to server/<identity>/cfg/server.cfg, edit, save, restart.

For live commands without restarting, use the RCON console in the dashboard. Same JSON protocol RustAdmin uses, exposed through your browser.

The wipe scheduler

In the dashboard, open Settings → Wipe schedule. You'll see two cadence fields, because Rust has two kinds of wipe.

Cadence options

• none: no automated wipe; you run them by hand from the dashboard.
• monthly: first matching weekday of each month. The industry-standard map wipe.
• biweekly: every two weeks on your chosen weekday.
• weekly: every week on your chosen weekday.
• twice-weekly: weekly on your chosen day, with a midweek (Thursday or Sunday) second wipe layered in.

Day and hour

wipeDayOfWeek is a number 0-6 (Sunday = 0, Thursday = 4, etc). wipeHourUtc is 0-23. Wipes run in UTC, not your local timezone; this matters in March and October when clocks shift. If your community is UK-based and you want a 6pm summer wipe, that's 17:00 UTC; in winter, that's 18:00 UTC. Pick one and stick to it, or accept a one-hour drift twice a year.

Map wipe vs blueprint wipe

These are set independently. wipeMapSchedule resets the procedural map and clears the world; players keep their unlocked blueprints. wipeBpSchedule clears player blueprints (the "tech tree" progress). The norm is monthly map, quarterly BP, which gives a fresh map every few weeks while keeping a bit of progression to chase. Setting BP to monthly is full force wipe; setting it to "none" means BPs never reset on a schedule.

What a wipe actually does

A map wipe regenerates the procedural map with a new seed, archives the old savefile, and resets player positions, base data, and loot. Plugin configs, oxide data files, server.cfg, and your domain stay put. A BP wipe clears player.blueprints so everyone's back to default tech tree progress. Combine them on the same schedule and you get a full force wipe.

We snapshot the old map to backups before regenerating, so if you ever need to roll back (broken seed, accidental wipe at the wrong hour), it's there. See manual backups.

Wipe day is a load test

Most hosts visibly struggle on wipe day. 200 players hit the connect button inside a five-minute window, the map decompresses, every plugin queues an OnPlayerConnected, and the tick rate drops to single digits. Our hardware (real cores, kernel-enforced RAM, NVMe, DDoS scrubbing in front) holds tick rate through that hit. That's the point of the Pro and Elite tiers existing.

Where to go next

• Rust server troubleshooting for what to do when a wipe didn't run or a plugin broke after a Rust update.
• Manual backups for pre-wipe snapshots and rollbacks.
• Console command blocked if RCON tells you a command is unavailable.

Last updated 2026-05-20. Notice a mistake? Tell us.