In a fire at a server farm in France, all EU servers of the survival game Rust have burned down. Players have therefore lost all progress they had made since the last reset. However, most of them are taking it in stride – especially veterans just shrug it off a bit.
What happened? On March 10th, there was a fire in a data center in Strasbourg, France, where Rust lost the server data of all 25 EU servers. The data center belongs to the provider OVH, where different customers had their servers set up.
What exactly was lost? All server-side data is lost, as there is no backup for it. This includes:
- Map data, meaning what loot is in which crates
- Buildings of players that they built on the map and stored equipment
- Inventory and equipment of players on the servers
In short: everything that players have achieved in Rust is now lost and seems irretrievable. This sounds like terrible news that no MMO player ever wants to hear. However, the Rust community isn’t really bothered by it.
Servers are literally smoking – players take it in stride
That’s why hardly anyone is bothered: Rust carries out a so-called “force wipe” from the developers each month, where all servers are reset – both official and the private servers that you can rent yourself.
This reduces server load and there is always the opportunity to restart. Especially veterans are already used to this and therefore see little problem in it happening outside of the rules. The user Yellow_Tissue on reddit writes, for example:
I’m pretty sure that the force wipe takes place once a month, but the vast majority of players play on servers with weekly resets. So it’s not really that bad and probably the reason why no one cared about a backup.
Most comments go in this direction. The last wipe took place on March 5, so not even a week of progress was lost. Also, all cosmetics should still be intact after the fire, as users on reddit explain. These are linked to the Steam inventory, not to the server data, and the inventory is unaffected.
Does the fire bother anyone? Not all players are taking the loss of data so easily. Some are even demanding compensation, like the user Teddddy on Twitter. He writes: “We better get something in return for all the people who grinded this week for their bases and now this SH*T! Hurry up and compensate the people.”
Some users, who claim to operate servers for clients themselves, write that they could create a backup with their small business in a short time. They wonder why Rust can’t manage that.
However, there are players who argue that Rust’s size would require a much larger effort. Furthermore, it is meaningless to have a backup for a game without long-term progress that is regularly reset.
In any case, the developers are already setting up new servers for Europe, and many of these servers are already live and accessible. So you won’t have to take a long break from playing. If you’re waiting for the console version of Rust, you might also be able to start soon: the beta for Rust on PS4 and Xbox One has already begun.
