Wipes in Tarkov: What Changed Forever at 1.0

The question every returning player asks first

You come back to Tarkov after a few months away, open your stash, and it is all still there. Then a friend tells you the wipe just happened, or that it is coming next week, and nobody in the group chat can agree on what actually reset.

That confusion is the problem this guide solves. For eight years, a Tarkov wipe meant one thing: everyone loses everything, the economy restarts, and the whole player base grinds from a pistol and a prayer. Since the 1.0 release, that sentence is no longer true, yet old forum posts, YouTube videos, and muscle memory keep the panic alive.

Here is the short version up front. Full-account wipes are over. The last one happened at the 1.0 launch on November 15, 2025. What exists now is a seasonal character that resets on a schedule, sitting next to your permanent PvP and PvE profiles that never get touched. Once you understand that split, every wipe rumor you read becomes easy to judge.

This guide walks through what wipes used to do, what replaced them, what actually resets at the end of a season, and how to plan your time so a season reset never catches you holding progress you cared about. By the end you will know exactly which parts of your account are safe forever and which parts are rented. Before reorganizing anything on a returning account, check the selected mode and compare its PMC level, active tasks, and hideout with what you remember. An unfamiliar stash is a reason to inspect the character selection screen first. If the expected profile still looks wrong, record the selected mode and the missing progress before investigating further. Creating another character or selling equipment will not help you establish what happened, and a friend's experience on a different profile is not evidence that yours reset.

At a glance: what resets and what never will

If you only read one section, read this table. It answers the core question for every part of your account.

The dividing line is not your account, it is the profile. One account can hold a seasonal character, a permanent PvP Zone character, and a PvE Zone character, and each follows different reset rules.

Everything unlocked as a season reward stays on the account permanently, even after the seasonal character that earned it is wiped. Everything still locked when the season ends is gone for good.

Version stamp and how to read this guide

Everything here was checked against Patch 1.1.5.0, the Lighthouse rework build that shipped on September 8, 2026, during Season 1 KORD BREACH. Battlestate has a long habit of retuning numbers between patches, so treat any specific figure quoted from community trackers as a snapshot rather than a law of nature.

Where the official patch notes state something plainly, this guide states it plainly. Where a number only exists because community sites measured or reported it, this guide says so in the same breath. The season system is young enough that some of its dials have already been adjusted once, and they will be adjusted again. When checking a newer announcement, identify three things: its publication date, the mode it names, and the progress category it changes. A task rebalance, a seasonal reset, and an adjustment to account rewards have different consequences. Read the surrounding paragraph as well as the headline; a statement about seasonal characters should not silently become a rule for PvE. If a report omits the affected mode, leave that part of your plan provisional until you find the actual announcement.

If you are reading this after Season 1 has ended, the structure of the system still applies. The theme, the modifiers, and the reward list rotate, but the relationship between seasonal characters and permanent profiles is the design Battlestate has committed to.

What a wipe meant in the beta era

From the start of the closed beta in 2017 through the end of early access in 2025, major patches frequently arrived with a full wipe. Every player's level, stash, quest progress, trader standing, and hideout went back to zero on the same day. It did not matter whether you had played for a week or for five years.

Wipes existed for practical reasons. The developers were rebalancing the economy, rebuilding quest lines, and adding systems that only made sense on a fresh profile. But wipes also became the game's most famous ritual. The first two weeks after a wipe were the most equal Tarkov ever got: nobody had tier six armor, nobody had a maxed bitcoin farm, and a scavenged shotgun was a real loadout.

That early-wipe atmosphere is what veterans mean when they say they miss wipes. They do not miss losing their stash. They miss the fresh economy, the level playing field, and the shared race through the early quests. Keep that distinction in mind, because the season system was built to deliver the race without the loss.

A practical note on beta-era knowledge: any guide, video, or Reddit thread dated before November 2025 that talks about preparing for the wipe is describing a system that no longer exists. The advice about selling your stash before patch day, for example, is now pointless on permanent profiles. Older material can still help with habits that do not depend on a reset date: planning a route, identifying an extraction, and leaving a raid once its objective is complete. Separate those lessons from claims about item demand, task order, or how many weeks remain to finish a grind. Reuse the decision process, then check the current requirements in game before committing scarce cash or several evenings to an old progression route.

November 15, 2025: the last full wipe

The 1.0 release, titled Echoes of Unfallen, launched on November 15, 2025, and both official channels and community trackers agree it was the final wipe that touched entire accounts. Everything before that date belongs to the beta era; everything after it follows the new rules.

This matters when you evaluate information sources. Tarkov has almost a decade of accumulated guides, and a large share of them assume wipe cycles. A 2024 video telling you to hoard certain items for early wipe, or to rush specific quests before the reset, is giving advice for a game that ended at 1.0. The mechanic it is optimizing for is gone.

If you stopped playing during the beta and came back recently, your instinct to ask when the next wipe is comes from real experience. The honest answer is that the question itself is outdated. The right question now is when the current season ends, and that only affects a seasonal character you may not even have created.

Seasons replaced wipes: how the seasonal character works

Patch 1.1.0.0, released on August 3, 2026, introduced the season system with Season 1 KORD BREACH. The centerpiece is the seasonal character: a brand-new profile type that lives on its own servers, completely separate from your PvP Zone and PvE Zone characters, and playable only in PvP.

A seasonal character starts from nothing. New PMC, empty stash, level one traders, an unbuilt hideout, and a fresh economy shared by everyone else playing the season. That is the wipe experience, isolated into its own lane. You create and switch to this character from a dedicated character selection screen, and your permanent profiles never know it exists.

Seasonal character progress resets automatically every four to six months, timed to coincide with major content updates and the start of the next season. Battlestate has stated the plan is two seasons per year, and the August 2026 roadmap places Season 2 in December alongside patch 1.4.

Think of the seasonal character as an opt-in wipe server. If you want the fresh-start race, you join the season and get exactly that, with everyone else who wanted it. If you do not want it, you simply never create a seasonal character, and nothing about your game changes when a season rolls over. Give your first few sessions one concrete purpose, such as learning a reliable extraction route or completing the next prerequisite for a reward you selected. Prepare a basic kit you can replace, identify the task's actual completion conditions, and decide when to leave before entering the raid. Trying to fund a hideout, hunt players, collect every useful item, and finish an unfamiliar objective at once makes it harder to tell which activity is moving you toward your seasonal goal.

Your permanent profiles are safe: PvP Zone and PvE Zone

The permanent PvP Zone profile is the direct continuation of the classic Tarkov experience, minus the resets. Your PMC level, stash, hideout, trader loyalty, quest progress, and Kappa container all persist indefinitely. Seasons do not touch this profile, and neither do major patches.

The PvE Zone profile is equally permanent. It is a fully separate mode with its own character, its own servers, and its own matchmaking pool, and it does not participate in seasons at all. There is no PvE season. Battlestate has previewed a Prestige system for PvE, but as of this writing it has not launched, and PvE-specific content including rewards usable in PvP has been promised for later.

This permanence changes how you should think about long-term goals. Hideout upgrades, the Kappa grind, and trader loyalty climbs are now investments that never expire. In the beta era, pushing for Kappa late in a wipe cycle was questionable because the wipe would erase it. That calculation no longer exists on permanent profiles; start the grind whenever you are ready. Persistence does not make every upgrade an urgent purchase, though. Keep enough equipment and currency available for the raids you actually want to play. If a hideout investment would consume that reserve, ask what benefit you expect to use during your next several sessions and whether a smaller upgrade would serve the same purpose. On a permanent profile, postponing construction until you can comfortably afford it is a budget decision, without the additional pressure of a seasonal deadline.

The new reset cycle: four to six months, twice a year

When people ask about the wipe schedule now, the accurate translation is the season reset schedule. Seasonal characters reset every four to six months, synchronized with big content patches, and Battlestate has committed to two seasons per year. Each new season brings a new theme and a new set of global modifiers.

For Season 1 KORD BREACH specifically, no official end date has been published in writing. The in-game main menu countdown points to December 7, 2026, and third-party reporting agrees with that reading, but treat the exact date as unconfirmed until Battlestate puts it in patch notes. The December placement of Season 2 on the official roadmap is consistent with that window.

Plan around the rhythm rather than the date. If a season is more than about four months old, assume the reset could arrive with the next major patch. That is the moment to finish the season objectives you care about, because the reset is not gentle: the seasonal character, its stash, and its progress do not carry over in any form. Set a personal finish date earlier than the displayed deadline, allowing for missed evenings, difficult objectives, and maintenance. Work backward from the reward: list the remaining requirements, identify the one most likely to take several attempts, and tackle it while you still have spare sessions. During your final planned session, inspect the reward status and complete any outstanding hand-ins or claim steps shown by the interface. Having the required item in your stash is not a useful stopping point if the objective still asks you to submit it.

What survives a season reset: unlocked rewards

Here is the part that makes the new system strictly better than the old one for collectors. Season rewards are unique trader trade offers, unlocked by reaching set PMC levels, completing designated quests, or finishing quest chains on your seasonal character. Once unlocked, they become permanently available on all three modes: seasonal PvP, PvP Zone, and PvE Zone.

Season 1's reward pool includes trading access to Black Division equipment, the season's themed faction, and these unlocks are account-wide gameplay additions rather than cosmetics. Anything you unlock the day before the reset stays with you the day after, on every character you own.

The flip side is absolute: any season reward still locked when the season ends can never be obtained again. There is no second chance and no legacy pool. So the strategic question each season is not whether to participate, but whether the specific rewards on offer are worth the hours a seasonal character demands from you.

If a season's rewards include something you know you will want on your permanent profile, such as a unique weapon trade, prioritize unlocking it early in the season. Early in a season, everyone on the seasonal servers is equally poor, which makes the leveling race feel fair. Late in a season you are grinding against people who have been there for months. Make a small reward ledger with the offer you want, its listed prerequisites, your next unfinished requirement, and its current unlock status. Distinguish access to a trader offer from the equipment you later purchase through it: the lasting benefit described here is the unlock, so filling a seasonal stash with copies is a separate spending choice. Once your chosen offer shows as unlocked, revisit the ledger before starting another chain. You may already have earned everything that justified joining the season.

Where the fresh-start feeling went: the 1.1.0.0 economy rebalance

Battlestate did not simply delete wipes; it tried to recreate their economic discipline on the permanent profiles. Patch 1.1.0.0 raised trader selling prices by about 25 percent on average, cut trader buyback prices by about 20 percent on average, and raised the flea market tax from 3 percent to 5 percent. Money became meaningfully harder to hoard overnight.

Side quests were also redistributed across trader loyalty levels, and squad shared quest progress was added. The net effect is that permanent PvP profiles got a soft economic reset without anyone losing a single item. Your stash survived, but the economy around it got leaner.

If you are a veteran wondering why your permanent profile feels poorer than it used to, this is why. The wipe pressure that used to come from deleting your wealth now comes from prices and taxes instead. For income strategies tuned to the post-1.1.0.0 economy, see the money-making and flea market guides linked at the end of this article.

Mode quirks the season system introduced

Insurance is the biggest behavioral split. In the PvP season, insurance is disabled entirely; only PvP Zone and PvE Zone runs can be insured. On a seasonal character, every death is final for that gear, which is a deliberate throwback to harsher wipe-era stakes. Do not pay for insurance habits out of muscle memory when you are playing the season; the option simply is not there. Build your seasonal budget around replacing the whole loadout. Include ammunition, medical supplies, armor, and the bag alongside the weapon when comparing two kits. A setup you can fund for several attempts is often more useful for a difficult objective than one expensive attempt that leaves you unable to continue. When playing with friends, agree on the objective and extraction plan before queuing; a shared plan makes it easier to leave once the required progress is secured.

The season also runs on modifiers that change the rules of play. Global modifiers apply to every seasonal participant, cannot be changed or disabled, and rotate with each season. Personal modifiers are optional picks you choose at character creation: negative ones grant points, positive ones cost points, the balance must be zero or better, and your picks are locked for the whole season with no respec.

Community trackers currently count roughly six global modifiers and about thirty-three selectable personal modifiers for Season 1, but the official patch notes do not list those numbers, so treat the counts as community-sourced rather than confirmed. What is official is the lock-in rule: whatever you pick at creation is yours until the reset, so read every modifier twice before committing.

The battle pass runs even if you skip the season

Season 1 also launched Tarkov's first battle pass, and it is free. Progress is shared across all three modes, which means you can advance it on your permanent PvP or PvE characters without ever touching the seasonal servers. Skipping the season does not mean skipping the pass.

You advance the pass by finding and turning in TerraGroup documents during raids, on PMC or scav runs, and through the KORD BREACH quest line and kills on Black Division operators. Documents found in raid are personal spawns that other players cannot steal from your corpse, while documents dropped by killed Black Division operators are shared with your whole squad.

Daily document intake is capped per mode with one shared progress counter. Community reporting puts the current caps at 30 for seasonal, 20 for permanent PvP, and 15 for PvE, adjusted upward from 25, 15, and 10 after a balance pass. Those caps are not written in official notes, so consider them unverified as of Patch 1.1.5.0 and check your in-game counter.

The only paid element anywhere in the pass is Classified Documents, a wildcard document type purchasable with TarCoin in the Expansion Hub that substitutes for any other document. Everything else is earnable through play. Unlocked pass rewards apply across all modes immediately, and anything seasonal left locked at season end is lost permanently.

Choosing where to spend your hours each season

With three profiles competing for your time, you need an allocation plan. Start with the rewards. Look at what the current season offers, and decide whether any of it must be on your permanent account. If yes, budget enough seasonal play to unlock those items before the reset window.

Next, consider your appetite for the fresh economy. If the early-wipe race is what you love about Tarkov, the seasonal character is now the only place to get it, and the first weeks of a season are the best version of it. If you prefer building long-term wealth and finishing big grinds like Kappa, your permanent PvP profile is where those hours compound.

PvE players lose nothing by ignoring seasons entirely. Your profile is permanent, the battle pass still progresses in your mode at its own document cap, and unlocked season rewards flow to PvE as well. The only thing you cannot do is earn the rewards that require seasonal character objectives, since those must be unlocked on the seasonal profile itself.

A sensible default for a returning intermediate player: keep your permanent PvP profile as your main, create a seasonal character in the first month of a season to chase any must-have rewards while the economy is flat, and let the battle pass tick up passively in the background on whichever mode you are playing that week. For example, a player with three evenings available could reserve two for one seasonal objective and one for permanent progression. That is a planning example, not an estimate of how quickly any reward can be earned. At the end of the week, compare actual progress with the remaining prerequisites. If the seasonal goal is consuming every session without becoming more attainable, choose a smaller goal or return to the mode you enjoy. Time already spent does not oblige you to finish every reward track.

Wipe-era advice you should now ignore

A lot of inherited Tarkov wisdom quietly expired at 1.0. Selling your entire stash the week before a patch, refusing to build hideout modules late in a cycle, speedrunning quests because the clock is ticking, and avoiding expensive gear because the wipe will take it anyway: all of that presumed a reset that is not coming to your permanent profiles.

The replacement discipline is season-aware, not wipe-aware. Check the roadmap for when the next season starts. Watch the in-game countdown rather than rumor threads for the current season's end. Spend seasonal time on season-locked rewards first, because those are the only things in the game with a true expiration date.

And when someone in your Discord announces that a wipe is coming, ask one clarifying question: wipe of what? If the answer is the season, your permanent stash is fine. If the answer claims a full-account wipe is returning, ask for the official patch note, because no such thing has been announced since 1.0 launched.

Expected outcome and what to do next

After reading this guide you should be able to state, without looking anything up, which parts of your account reset and when: seasonal characters every four to six months, permanent PvP and PvE profiles never. You should also have a plan for the current season's exclusive rewards before its reset arrives.

For the full mechanical detail on the current season, including modifiers, the battle pass, and Black Division content, read /guides/season-1-kord-breach-guide. If the season talk has you rethinking which mode to main, /guides/pve-vs-pvp breaks down the permanent mode split, and /guides/insurance-guide explains the insurance rules that differ between seasonal and permanent play.

Since permanent progress never resets now, long-horizon grinds are finally safe investments: /guides/kappa-container-guide for the container, /guides/trader-loyalty-guide for the post-1.1.0 trader requirements, and /guides/hideout-upgrade-priority for the build order. For the leaner post-wipe economy, /guides/money-making-guide and /guides/flea-market-guide cover earning under the new prices and the 5 percent flea tax.

For reference data, the trader pages such as /traders/mechanic list current loyalty requirements, /maps/lighthouse covers the map reworked in the current patch, and /tools/trader-loyalty lets you check requirement thresholds directly. Recheck this guide after each major patch; the season structure is stable, but the details around it move.