V Rising dedicated server: settings and admins

A V Rising dedicated server is a free Windows application (Steam app 1829350) configured by two JSON files. ServerHostSettings.json holds what the server is - name, ports, password, player cap, save name, autosave, RCON. ServerGameSettings.json holds how the game plays - PvP or PvE, castle raiding rules, clan size, loot and crafting rates, day length. It listens on UDP 9876 for the game and 9877 for the Steam query, holds up to 40 players by default, and keeps its world as numbered autosaves under a folder you choose with -persistentDataPath. Admins are SteamIDs in adminlist.txt. Everything below is the detail: which copy of the files the server actually reads, what each setting does, and how not to lose a castle.

How V Rising servers work#

A V Rising world can be played alone, hosted privately from the game, or on a dedicated server. The dedicated server keeps the world - castles, servants, territory, progress - running and reachable with nobody online, which matters more in V Rising than in most survival games because castles decay when their hearts run out of blood essence. A server that is offline cannot be raided, but a castle whose owner has not logged in for a week still decays on a running one.

Facts that shape the rest of the setup:

• The server binary is Windows only. Stunlock ship VRisingServer.exe. On Linux it runs under Wine or Proton. Wine and Proton for Windows-only servers covers the general approach.
• Characters live on the server. Unlike Valheim or Enshrouded, a V Rising character belongs to one server's save. A player starts fresh on every new server.
• There are two copies of each settings file. The defaults in the install and the active copies in your data folder. Editing the wrong one is the most common setup mistake, covered next.

Requirements#

V Rising's server is moderate. Memory grows with the number of castles and servants more than with players.

Add a little memory when running under Wine. ServerFps in the host settings (default 30) sets how many simulation frames the server tries to run per second; leave it at the default. Raising it costs CPU in direct proportion and rarely improves anything players notice. What tick rate actually means explains why.

Installing and the persistent data path#

$ steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows \    +force_install_dir /home/vrising/server \    +login anonymous +app_update 1829350 validate +quit

The server should always be started with a persistent data path - the folder where it keeps its saves and the active copies of its settings:

VRisingServer.exe -persistentDataPath .\save-data -serverName "Longship Vampires" -saveName "world1" -logFile ".\logs\VRisingServer.log"

Without -persistentDataPath, the server uses a folder deep in the Windows user profile, which is hard to find, hard to back up, and lost if the user profile changes. Set it once and never change it; changing it later points the server at an empty folder, and it will start a fresh world.

The settings files exist in two places:

Copy ServerHostSettings.json and ServerGameSettings.json from the install's StreamingAssets/Settings/ into <persistentDataPath>/Settings/, then edit only those copies. Edits made to the files in the install folder are lost the next time the server updates. Launch arguments such as -serverName and -saveName override the matching host settings, which is useful on a panel where they are fields on the Startup tab and confusing if you forget they are there.

ServerHostSettings.json#

{  "Name": "Longship Vampires",  "Description": "PvE, relaxed rates, EU evenings",  "Port": 9876,  "QueryPort": 9877,  "MaxConnectedUsers": 40,  "MaxConnectedAdmins": 4,  "ServerFps": 30,  "SaveName": "world1",  "Password": "",  "Secure": true,  "ListOnSteam": true,  "ListOnEOS": true,  "AutoSaveCount": 20,  "AutoSaveInterval": 120,  "CompressSaveFiles": true,  "GameSettingsPreset": "",  "AdminOnlyDebugEvents": true,  "DisableDebugEvents": false,  "Rcon": { "Enabled": false, "Port": 25575, "Password": "" }}

SaveName is the world. Change it and the server starts a new world under the new name; change it back and the old one returns. That makes it the cleanest way to run a fresh season while keeping the last one on disk.

GameSettingsPreset is the other trap. With a preset name set - such as StandardPvP or StandardPvE - the server uses that preset and ignores your ServerGameSettings.json. Leave it empty to use your own file.

ServerGameSettings.json: the rules#

ServerGameSettings.json is long. The settings people change first:

Rates and costs are multipliers where 1.0 is the standard game:

• MaterialYieldModifier_Global - resources gathered.
• DropTableModifier_General - loot from enemies and containers.
• BloodEssenceYieldModifier - blood essence gained, which feeds castle hearts.
• InventoryStacksModifier - stack sizes.
• CraftRateModifier - crafting speed (higher is faster).
• ResearchCostModifier, RefinementCostModifier, BuildCostModifier - costs (lower is cheaper).
• ServantConvertRateModifier - speed of turning humans into servants.
• CastleDecayRateModifier - how fast unfed castles decay. 0 effectively turns decay off.
• CastleBloodEssenceDrainModifier - how fast castle hearts burn blood essence.

TeleportBoundItems=false is the most requested quality-of-life change; it lets players carry ores through waygates and removes a lot of walking. TeleportBoundItems and BloodBoundEquipment together decide how punishing death and travel are, so agree them as a group.

Nested objects hold more detailed rules. GameTimeModifiers sets day length (DayDurationInSeconds) and day hours; VampireStatModifiers and UnitStatModifiers_Global scale damage and health; UnitStatModifiers_VBlood scales the V Blood bosses; and CastleStatModifiers_Global holds castle limits, including HeartLimits per heart level (floor tiles and servant counts) and the number of castles each player may own. Change these in small steps; boss health and damage changes ripple through the whole progression.

The full set of keys changes with game versions. The file in the install's StreamingAssets/Settings/ is the reference for your version, and Stunlock's own server documentation describes each key.

PvP windows and castle raiding#

On a PvP server, TimeRestricted modes limit fighting and raiding to set hours, defined under PlayerInteractionSettings:

"CastleDamageMode": "TimeRestricted","PlayerDamageMode": "Always","PlayerInteractionSettings": {  "TimeZone": "Local",  "VSPlayerWeekdayTime": { "StartHour": 18, "StartMinute": 0, "EndHour": 23, "EndMinute": 0 },  "VSPlayerWeekendTime": { "StartHour": 16, "StartMinute": 0, "EndHour": 23, "EndMinute": 0 },  "VSCastleWeekdayTime": { "StartHour": 19, "StartMinute": 0, "EndHour": 22, "EndMinute": 0 },  "VSCastleWeekendTime": { "StartHour": 18, "StartMinute": 0, "EndHour": 23, "EndMinute": 0 }}

TimeZone can be Local (the server machine's clock) or a named zone; check your version's documentation for the accepted names. Raid windows are the main tool for making PvP fair to people who cannot be online all evening: a castle cannot be broken into while its owners are asleep. Choose hours that fit where your players are. A server in Germany with a European community wants evenings in Central European time; a server whose players are spread across continents needs a compromise that someone will dislike.

TimeZone: Local follows the server's clock, which on many hosted servers is UTC. If raid windows open an hour or two off, that is why. Set the zone explicitly or adjust the hours.

A worked example: relaxed PvE for six friends#

A small group playing a few evenings a week wants different things from a public PvP server, and the defaults are tuned for the latter. A configuration that tends to work:

"GameModeType": "PvE","CastleDamageMode": "Never","ClanSize": 6,"TeleportBoundItems": false,"BloodBoundEquipment": true,"MaterialYieldModifier_Global": 2.0,"InventoryStacksModifier": 2.0,"CraftRateModifier": 2.0,"ServantConvertRateModifier": 2.0,"CastleDecayRateModifier": 0.0

The reasoning, line by line. PvE with castle damage off because nobody in a friends' group wants to come back to a looted base. A clan size that fits the whole group, so everyone shares one castle if they want to. Waygates that carry resources, because walking ore across the map is the least interesting part of the game for people with limited evenings. Gear kept on death, so a bad fight costs time but not hours of crafting. Double yield, stacks, crafting and servant conversion to fit the game into a few evenings a week without skipping it entirely. And no castle decay, because the one person who goes on holiday for two weeks should not lose their part of the castle.

What it leaves alone is just as deliberate: boss health and damage stay at standard, so the V Blood fights - the reason most people play - keep their difficulty. If the group finds bosses too hard once they have caught up on gear, UnitStatModifiers_VBlood is the place to adjust, in small steps.

Performance and restarts#

V Rising's server is steady for a long time on a small group and starts to cost more as castles and servants multiply. Servants are simulated whether their owner is online or not, and large castles are many objects to save. If autosaves cause a noticeable hitch on a mature world, CompressSaveFiles trades a little CPU for smaller writes, and a slightly longer AutoSaveInterval makes the hitch less frequent at the cost of a larger worst-case loss.

A daily or weekly restart at a quiet hour keeps memory flat on a long-running world; restart schedules that help covers the timing, and RCON's announcerestart command is the clean way to warn players ahead of it.

Ports and connecting#

Both game ports are UDP. If the server runs but nobody can see it, the query port is the first suspect - game server ports explained has the reasoning. Players can search the in-game browser by name or use Direct Connect with the address and game port. A new server takes a few minutes to appear in the list.

Admins, console and RCON#

Admin rights come from adminlist.txt in <persistentDataPath>/Settings/ (copy it from the install's defaults if it is missing), one SteamID64 per line. The ban list is banlist.txt beside it. Both are read while the server runs.

An admin enables the in-game console (in the game's options, under the general settings), opens it with the backtick or tilde key, and authenticates:

AdminOnlyDebugEvents and DisableDebugEvents in the host settings control whether admins can use debug events such as spawning; on a fair PvP server, keep them restricted.

RCON is limited. When enabled, it supports a small set of commands, essentially server announcements and a timed restart announcement (announce and announcerestart). It is useful for scheduled warnings, not for administration. Protect it as you would any remote console - RCON safely covers how.

Saves, backups and wipes#

Saves live under <persistentDataPath>/Saves/, in a version folder (such as v3 or v4, depending on the save format of your build), then a folder named after SaveName, containing numbered autosaves. The server writes one every AutoSaveInterval seconds and keeps AutoSaveCount of them, deleting the oldest.

• Back up the whole `Saves` folder and your `Settings` folder - daily, and before every update. The autosaves are on the same disk as the world they protect.
• Stop cleanly. A clean stop writes the world. A kill or out-of-memory stop loses whatever happened since the last autosave.
• Restore by stopping the server, putting the backed-up save folder back under the same SaveName, and starting it. To roll back within the server's own autosaves, remove the newer autosave folders so the one you want is the latest. Keep copies of what you remove.
• Wipe by changing SaveName. The new world starts empty; the old one stays on disk.

Backups that actually restore explains why restoring one backup on purpose matters more than taking many.

On RE:NODE, the persistent data folder and both JSON files are reachable in the file manager and over SFTP, backup slots come with every game plan, and the Schedules tab can run a nightly backup and restart. V Rising has no catalogue line of its own; see the game server list for what is offered.

Mods#

V Rising mods run on BepInEx, distributed mostly through Thunderstore. Server-side mods add admin commands, quality-of-life rules and events without requiring anything on the client; some mods need both. Major game updates break BepInEx mods until they are rebuilt, so a modded server should not update on patch day. What to do when a mod update breaks covers that day. Many servers run vanilla, because ServerGameSettings.json already covers most of what players want to change.

Troubleshooting#

Settings changes do nothing. You edited the copy in StreamingAssets, GameSettingsPreset is set, or a launch argument overrides the value.

The server started a new world. SaveName or -persistentDataPath changed. Put them back and restart.

Not in the server browser. Query port closed or not UDP, ListOnSteam false, or the list is slow. Test with Direct Connect.

Raid windows are at the wrong time. The server clock is UTC and TimeZone is Local.

Admin commands are refused. The SteamID is not in adminlist.txt in the active Settings folder, or adminauth was not run.

FAQ#

How many players can a V Rising server have?

MaxConnectedUsers defaults to 40. Larger numbers are possible, but castles and servants scale with players and the server needs memory and CPU to match.

Do V Rising characters transfer between servers?

No. Characters belong to the server's save. Joining a new server means starting a new character.

How do I turn off castle decay?

Set CastleDecayRateModifier to 0 in ServerGameSettings.json. On a private server it saves people from losing a castle while away.

Can I run V Rising on Linux?

Only through Wine or Proton; the server is a Windows build.

How do I start a fresh season?

Change SaveName and restart. The server creates a new world, and the old save stays in its folder.