The next Escape from Tarkov wipe appears to have arrived – or at least, it will be soon, at the time of this writing. The hardcore FPS survival game will be going offline for maintenance shortly, and while the official announcement for patch 0.12.12.30 doesn’t actually mention a wipe, players are convinced this patch will reset all progress and send everyone back to the starting line.
Escape from Tarkov will be going offline June 29 at midnight PDT / 3am EDT / 8am BST, and will be down for about five hours, Battlestate Games has announced. That timeframe may be extended “if required,” the announcement reads, and Tarkov will not be accessible during this period.
The past week or so has been full of increasingly silly events in Escape from Tarkov, and that kind of goofiness has typically preceded a major patch that requires a ‘wipe’. For non-Tarkov players, this is when all the progress everyone has made in Tarkov is set back to zero – all the equipment, ammo, money, and other valuables players have amassed, all their character skill development, and all the work they’ve put into their bases all vanishes.
To the uninitiated, that probably sounds like a bummer, but in Tarkov it’s generally greeted with excitement. Wipes mean everyone is put back on the same level again, making PvP much more even than it tends to be as time goes on and the player base stratifies itself into tiers. It’s a bit like the start of a new season pass, but for a game that doesn’t actually have a season pass.
Not all Tarkov updates require wipes, but several Discord messages from mods on the official Tarkov server, plus the long downtime required for this patch and the ‘pre-wipe’ goofiness of the past week, indicate pretty clearly that this’ll be the one.