How to Schedule Automatic Wipes and Restarts on Rust Console (G-Portal)

What a wipe actually does on Rust Console

A "wipe" resets your server's world so everyone starts fresh. It is the single biggest driver of population, because the first 24 to 48 hours after a wipe are peak activity: full servers, hot fights, and the window where players spend the most on kits and perks. But "wipe" is not one thing. On Rust Console you are really choosing between two levels of reset, and picking the wrong one confuses your regulars.

A map wipe (buildings and loot) regenerates the world. Every base, tool cupboard, box, and deployable is gone, and the map itself is rebuilt. What players keep is the blueprints they have already learned, so a returning group can build a workbench and tech up quickly instead of starting from stone. This is the lighter reset most servers run weekly, because it keeps the map fresh without punishing loyal players.

A blueprint wipe (often called a full wipe or BP wipe) does everything a map wipe does and also resets every player's learned blueprints back to zero. The whole server climbs the tech tree again from scratch. This is the deeper reset that flattens the power curve completely. Whichever you pick, it is worth generating a new map seed at the same time so the terrain genuinely changes. Reusing the same seed gives players an identical map, which gets stale fast.

Where the G-Portal wipe scheduler lives

Log into your G-Portal account and open your Rust Console server from the dashboard. Inside the server's control panel, look for the scheduling section, where G-Portal groups the restart and wipe tasks. This is where you create automated jobs that run without you touching anything. You are not editing a config file by hand here, you are filling in a simple form.

You create a task and choose what it does: a plain restart, a map wipe, or a full wipe that also clears blueprints. Then you set how often it runs and at what time. You can stack more than one task, so a common setup is a nightly restart to clear lag plus a weekly wipe on your chosen day. Save the task and G-Portal handles it from then on, even while you are offline.

Daily, Weekly, Biweekly or Monthly (and the timezone catch)

The scheduler gives you four intervals. Daily suits a restart task that keeps performance clean. Weekly is the standard wipe cadence for most active servers. Biweekly (every two weeks) suits building-focused or PVE servers where players want more time to develop bases. Monthly lines up with the game's own big reset. You set the day and the exact time the task fires.

Here is the mistake almost everyone makes on their first setup: the time field is not your local time and it is not your console's time. G-Portal runs the scheduler in UTC, and the panel may label it GMT, which is the same clock. If you want the classic Thursday 18:00 UTC wipe, you enter 18:00, not your own 6pm. Convert first. In winter that is 1:00 PM US Eastern, 10:00 AM US Pacific, and 6:00 PM in the UK; in summer each of those shifts an hour later. In Australia it lands in the small hours of Friday. Set it in your local time by accident and you can end up wiping at 3am, mid-fight, on an empty server.

Pick the hour deliberately. Restarts cause a short outage and a reconnect, so schedule those for a genuinely quiet window. Wipes are the opposite: you want the fresh map to land right before your community's busiest hours, giving you the longest possible peak-spend window while people are online and hungry for loot.

How often you should actually wipe

Weekly is the safe default, and Thursday is the day most players expect. Rust Console gets a monthly game update, and that update forces a server wipe, so the monthly reset is out of your hands. Around that, the community has settled on Thursday at roughly 18:00 UTC as the familiar rhythm for weekly wipes, so aligning your schedule to it means nobody is surprised. Newer and smaller servers almost always do better on weekly, because a fresh map is your best tool for pulling a crowd back in.

There is also a technical reason not to stretch it too far. A server that is not wiped at least monthly tends to get unstable and laggy as the world fills with structures and entities. If you run biweekly for a build-heavy community, that is fine, but do not let a server go a full month or more without a reset. Match the cadence to your crowd, keep it predictable, and treat every wipe as a relaunch: the first two days decide your numbers for the week.

Automatic restarts, and why your server reboots on its own

A scheduled restart is healthy. It clears memory, resets accumulated lag, and gives the server a clean state. A nightly or every-other-day restart at a quiet hour is cheap insurance against the slow slowdown that hits long-running servers. You set it exactly like a wipe task, just without erasing anything.

Not every reboot is one you scheduled, though. G-Portal auto-updates your server when the developers push a patch, and that forces a restart on its own timing, sometimes in the middle of your day. Two things follow from this. First, every restart drops the WebRCON connection, so any bot managing your server goes offline until it reconnects. Second, and this catches a lot of owners: settings you changed live over RCON do not survive a restart unless they were written to the server config. If you tuned something like gather scale on the fly and never saved it, a surprise patch reboot can quietly revert it. Save your settings so a restart, scheduled or not, keeps them.

Keep your players (and your bot) from being caught out

This is the part most guides skip, and it is what separates a server people trust from one they abandon. A wipe that fires with no warning boots everyone mid-session and looks like a crash. Players who were about to log a big raid or finish a base just lose it with no notice, and a chunk of them do not come back. The fix is simple: warn ahead of time, in-game and in your Discord, at 30 minutes, 10 minutes, and 1 minute.

Doing that by hand every wipe is a chore, and after the restart your management bot has to come back online by itself or the server runs blind. A WebRCON bot handles both: it can auto-announce the countdown in-game and post it to Discord, then reconnect itself once the fresh server is up and confirm it is back. If you have not linked one yet, you can connect a bot to your G-Portal server with just the server IP, RCON port, and RCON password. Reliability matters most here, because a wipe is exactly the moment a flaky bot fails, so it is worth reading up on why a bot stops working after a restart and how to stop a bot that keeps dropping the connection so your announcements and your reconnect actually happen. Vantic is built to auto-announce the wipe and pull itself back online the moment the server returns, so a scheduled reset never leaves your community in the dark.

A quick wipe-day checklist

Before your scheduled wipe fires, run through the basics so the reset lands clean. Confirm the task is set in UTC and on the right day. Generate a new map seed so the terrain actually changes. Make sure your countdown announcements are set to go out in-game and in Discord. Update your server name or description with the wipe date if you advertise it, since a current listing helps you get found in the community browser right after the reset. After the restart, check that your bot reconnected and the server is answering, then be online for the first hour when population and spend peak. For the full pre-wipe and launch routine, work through the complete Rust Console wipe-day checklist so nothing slips on the busiest day of your week.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

Connect a bot to your G-Portal server · The Rust Console wipe-day checklist · When your bot stops working after a restart · G-Portal or Nitrado for Rust Console · Fix a bot that keeps disconnecting