Change the Missile Silo Timer on Rust

On the lowest level of the Nuclear Missile Silo there is a countdown labeled "REPOPULATION UNIT SURVIVAL TEST". Facepunch's wiki says it counts down to the next server wipe and that the same wipe-timer settings decide when the endgame events (jets and road Bradleys) begin. If your wipe day or hour is not Facepunch's default, you set the timer yourself from the Startup tab. Checked against Facepunch's Server Wipe Timer wiki page and Rust build 2635, October 2026.

Your real wipes are scheduled on the Wipes tab. How to set your Rust wipe schedule, map and blueprint wipes covers that side. This guide makes the two agree.

What the timer starts from

A new server reports its timezone at boot as "Timezone: GMT (ID=Europe/London, IANA=Europe/London)", and Facepunch's defaults are London time. They depend on the wipe tag your server carries (the server.tags convar is covered in the server.cfg guide):

• monthly: the first Thursday of each month at 19:00 London time
• weekly: every Thursday at 19:00 London time
• biweekly: the first and third Thursday of each month at 19:00 London time (in a five-week month, Facepunch splits the three-week gap into two weeks and one week)

A server that wipes at a different hour or in a different time zone needs its own hour and timezone set. A server with no wipe tag follows the monthly pattern: on a new server, wipetimer.printwipe showed the cron 0 19 * * 4#1, the first Thursday of the month.

The settings

Each one is a convar. Typing find wipetimer in the Console tab lists them with the game's own descriptions and current values.

Change it

1. Open the Startup tab.
2. In Additional Arguments, add the settings you want, each starting with a +. Set the timezone to your server's local time, the one the Wipes tab names beside its Time box, as an IANA ID: Australia/Sydney for a server in Sydney, America/Chicago for one in Dallas. For a Thursday wipe at 7 pm on a Sydney server:

+wipetimer.wipetimezone Australia/Sydney +wipetimer.wipedayofweek 4 +wipetimer.wipehourofday 19

3. Press Save on that row, then Restart now when the banner asks.

If Additional Arguments already holds something, keep it and add yours after it with a space between.

Day, hour and timezone on their own keep the monthly pattern, only moved to your time. They don't make it weekly.

Weekly or biweekly timers

For a weekly or biweekly timer, Facepunch's wiki uses the wipe tag: weekly is every Thursday and biweekly is the first and third Thursday. Add the tag to your server.tags list, as the server.cfg guide shows, and set the hour and timezone as above. For any other pattern, use wipetimer.wipecronoverride. Facepunch's own example is first and third Thursday at 2 pm:

+wipetimer.wipecronoverride "0 14 1-7,15-21 * 4"

Check the result

Once the server is back up, type wipetimer.printwipe in the Console tab. It prints the ticks until the wipe, the cron expression and the next ten occurrences. With your server's timezone set, those times come back in that time zone, so you can compare them against your Wipes schedule at a glance.

A fixed one-off date

wipetimer.wipeunixtimestampoverride is the simplest way to land the timer on a particular moment. Facepunch notes that if the timestamp is already in the past the server ignores it and falls back to the other wipe settings, so set a new one after each wipe.

Turn the endgame events off or later

The eventschedulewipeoffset.event_hours_before_wipe convar controls how long before the wipe the endgame events start. It defaults to 24, and Facepunch says setting it to 0 turns the events off. It is a convar like the others, so it goes in Additional Arguments the same way: +eventschedulewipeoffset.event_hours_before_wipe 0.