Rust force wipe 3 September: Power Trip eats RAM, SetFlag dies with it

Quick reality check: The next PC force wipe is Thursday, 3 September 2026, 19:00 UK time. Official servers reset the map. Most community servers follow. On top of that sits what August already changed: Power Trip — island-wide power grid, Heavy Fuses, Satellite Crash — and for plugin authors SetFlag dies with this exact wipe.

If wipe night is just “new map, drop Oxide, hope”, you either get a world that folds under the new events, or plugins that will not load after the artifact update.

What Power Trip does on a dedicated box

• More live monuments. Power Plant, Dome, Launch Site, Airfield — features players switch on. More entities, more ticks, more RAM than a quiet August wipe before that.
• Satellite Crash and the grid. Events that touch the whole island. Peak nights after wipe are heavier than vanilla force wipes in 2025.
• Jobs 4. UsePlayerUpdateJobs 4 can save entities in parallel. On busy community servers you feel that on save spikes, not in the Steam blurb.
• SetFlag gone on 3 September. Facepunch removes the old API with this wipe. Oxide/uMod plugins that still call SetFlag need StartSetFlags first — or the mod stack will not start.

Checklist before 3 September

1. Back up the world and the plugin folder. Snapshot plus download before SteamCMD runs. A wipe with no backup is a choice, not an accident.
2. Stop the server, pull the artifact, then wipe. SteamCMD / panel update to the September build. Same version on client and server, or you get EAC disconnects and an empty queue.
3. Check uMod/Oxide and plugins. Anything that sets entity flags needs to match the September build. Stale plugin = server starts, world loads, commands are dead.
4. Be honest about map size and population. Power Trip on a stuffed procedural plus 200 entity events is not the same plan as 2k vanilla. Raise RAM, not the slot count.
5. Ports stay 28015 TCP/UDP. Query and game. Firewall in the panel, not “guess again after wipe”.
6. Wipe night is peak. More joins, more entities, more UDP. If the tick dies: entity budget and view first, then RAM — do not reread last week’s DDoS post and change nothing.

What hardware after Power Trip

8 GB is enough for a small community map. Full grid plus mods plus 50+ players on wipe night needs more: strong single-core, NVMe, 16 GB as a sensible floor for modded. HDD stutters on entity saves.

At NexoraHost, Rust runs as a game server from Frankfurt, no slot limit. You set CPU and RAM in the panel. EAC and UDP are part of the setup, not a marketing slide.

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Rust guides · Facepunch: Power Trip