Move an Enshrouded world to a dedicated server

1. What moves, and what stays behind#

• The world moves. Keen's dedicated server FAQ: "The world progression is stored on the dedicated servers." Bases, Flame Altars, rescued survivors and what you built with them belong to the world.
• Characters stay on each player's PC. "Character progression is stored only on clients." Players join the server with the character they already have, which keeps its "entire equipment and inventory, as well as levels / skills unlocked", in Keen's words.
• Roles do not move. On a dedicated server, permissions come from user groups in enshrouded_server.json, each "with a unique configuration of permissions and an accompanying password". Roles you handed out while hosting from the game stay behind; give each friend the password for the group they should be in.
• Settings come from the server. A dedicated server takes its difficulty and gameplay settings from enshrouded_server.json, and Keen says they "need to be set before starting the server". Keen does not say whether a world's own settings survive the move, so set the ones you want in the server's file. The Enshrouded server settings guide covers each one.

2. Find your world on your PC#

Since 1.0, Keen says "The locally stored save data can now be found in this save data folder in Windows": %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\keen games\Enshrouded\default. The game now shows local and Steam Cloud saves on separate tabs in the world menu, so check which tab your world is on. Steam Cloud copies sit under Steam\userdata\<your Steam Friend Code>\1203620\remote; Keen says the number is "your Friend Code in the Steam settings under "Account"".

What you find there depends on when the world was last played:

• A world opened in 1.0. Keen says 1.0 "uses a new save data format which results in smaller save game files and a simpler data structure", and it has not published the new file names. We have not seen a 1.0 PC save folder ourselves. Our 1.0 server keeps its whole world in one file, world0.ksd; if your folder looks the same, character saves live in that folder too and change in the same session, so check a file's name, not only its time, before you upload it.
• An Early Access world not opened since. Before 1.0, Keen's help page put local saves in %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Enshrouded, so a world last played in Early Access may still be there. Such a world was 22 files: a base file named with a fixed hexadecimal code, nine numbered copies (-1 to -9), an -index file, and the same set again with _info in the name. Keen lists the codes "in order of creation": the first world is 3ad85aea, the second 3bd85c7d, the third 38d857c4, and so on.

Copy the whole folder somewhere safe before you touch anything. Keen's own advice: "create a copy of all save files, to prevent accidental loss of data."

3. What a 1.0 server looks for#

We ran a 1.0 server (game build 1269579, the 1.0.0.2 hotfix) and tried each kind of file on it. Its world lives in the savegame folder that saveDirectory points at, next to the server's executable:

The server also keeps ten copies of its world in savegame/backup, named world0.ksd.backup-0 to -9, with -0 the newest. An unwanted empty world is not harmless: on ours, its first save replaced the newest backup copy of the real world. So when the server starts a world you did not expect, stop it at once.

4. Move it#

1. Stop the server, and download its whole savegame folder as a backup.
2. Delete the server's world0.ksd. Leave the backup folder alone.
3. Upload your world into savegame, and give it the server's name.
   • A 1.0 world: its .ksd world file, renamed to world0.ksd.
   • An Early Access world: all 22 files, with the eight-character code at the start of each name changed to 3ad85aea, so 3bd85c7d-index becomes 3ad85aea-index and so on. Or open the world in the 1.0 game first: Keen says that when you load version 1.0 for the first time and it finds an Early Access save, the save "will be firstly backed up" and then converted to the new format. Then upload the new file instead.
4. Start the server and check that it loaded your world. Size tells you most: every new empty world0.ksd on ours was exactly 42,833 bytes, while an Early Access world from April 2025 came out at 2.9 MB. The log line [server] Savegame deserialization took ... said under a second for the empty worlds and 2.49 s for that one.
5. Have everyone join with their own characters, using the user-group passwords you set in enshrouded_server.json.

Going back to an older copy

The rollback Keen describes, editing "latest" in an -index file, belongs to the Early Access format; a 1.0 server writes no -index file. On ours a rollback was a file copy, and the copies are easy to mix up. Their numbers are not evenly spaced: -1 was about a minute older than -0, -2 a few minutes older again, and -3 to -9 still held the server's first three minutes almost an hour later. Right after we moved a world in, -1 to -9 still held the server's previous world.

So stop the server, download world0.ksd and the whole backup folder first, choose the copy by its modified time rather than its number, and copy it over world0.ksd. If the world that starts is not the one you wanted, stop at once, because its first save replaces backup-0. Keen's warning from before 1.0 still applies: "DO NOT KEEP PLAYING ON A BROKEN SAVE", because the rolling copies will eventually replace the good ones.

Moving it back to your PC

Keen does not document this direction, and we could not test the PC side. On our server the world was saved every 30 seconds and not when it stopped, so wait half a minute after the last change in the game, stop the server, download world0.ksd, and put it in your local save folder under a name no local world is using.

5. PS5#

The PS5 version came out on 2026-10-15, the same day as 1.0 on PC. Keen says the game "will not be cross-platform at launch", and it offers no way to move a PS5 world to PC, so there is no route from a console to a dedicated server for now.

Where ForgeWorld Gaming fits#

On your control panel's Files tab, savegame sits at the top level next to enshrouded_server.json, which is where Keen says a host's file manager will show it. The file steps in section 4 are done there: delete, upload, rename, and Archive, which packs a folder such as savegame into one file you can download. Stop and Start are on the Console tab. For an Early Access world, zip the 22 files on your PC, upload the zip into savegame, and use Unarchive, then rename each file. Files over 100 MB are refused by the upload, so use SFTP from the Settings tab for anything bigger. The Files tab shows sizes in KiB and MiB, so the empty world reads 41.83 KiB and the converted one 2.81 MiB, and recent times as "about 1 hour ago": hover over a time for the exact one, or read the times in a downloaded archive. To roll back there, delete world0.ksd, upload the copy you chose into savegame, and rename it world0.ksd.

On a test server on 2026-10-21 we ran the server side of section 4, the Early Access conversion and the rollback; finding a world on a PC, opening it in the game, players joining, and moving a world back were not part of the test. With nobody connected, our test server saved the world every 30 seconds, and the Stop button ended it at once without a final save, so after a last change in the game, wait half a minute before stopping. The Startup tab's Server Password is the password players type to join: each start writes it into the Default user group in enshrouded_server.json, and if the field is empty, the Default group keeps the password it has, a random one on a new server; the Console tab shows it once the server is up, and the file keeps it under userGroups. The settings guide covers the other groups. Last checked 2026-10-22.

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