A Valheim character is a file on the player's own machine, not on your server. The server stores the world - terrain, builds, chests, tombstones, tames, boss progress - and trusts each client to say who they are, what they carry and what skills they have. That design is why a character can travel freely between worlds, and also why a vanilla dedicated server cannot stop someone arriving with items spawned in single player, a restored copy of their character, or a file edited with a save editor. Admins can control who joins and what happens in the world. They cannot control what a character file contains. If that matters for your server, the answer is a server-side character mod, and it has costs of its own.
This guide explains what is in a character file and what is not, the ways items enter a world from outside, how duplication happens (including the kind nobody did on purpose), what an admin can realistically do in vanilla, and what mods such as ServerCharacters change.
What lives in the character and what lives in the world#
The split is the key to everything else in this post.
| Stored in the character file (client) | Stored in the world (server) |
|---|---|
| Inventory and equipped gear | Buildings, chests and their contents |
| Skills and their levels | Terrain edits and planted crops |
| Known recipes, materials and pieces | Tombstones and items on the ground |
| Food, appearance, name, beard and hair | Tames and creatures |
| Active Forsaken power | Global keys from bosses |
| Map exploration and pins, per world | Portals, wards, signs |
| Spawn point (bed), per world | World modifiers |
Characters remember each world they have visited separately: a map and a bed for this server, another map and bed for a single-player world. The map is not shared with the group unless players use a cartography table - maps are per character covers how that works.
The character file is Name.fch. On Windows with Steam it is in:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\characters_local\If the player keeps characters in Steam Cloud, they are in the characters folder beside it instead, and the in-game Manage Saves screen moves them between the two. Linux players on Steam find the same folders under ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/. The game also keeps older copies alongside the current file; how many and under what names has changed between versions. The Game Pass and Microsoft Store edition keeps saves elsewhere, covered in Game Pass and Microsoft Store world files, and on Xbox the files are not reachable at all. The server side of the file layout is in save directories and file locations.
Nothing about characters is ever stored on the dedicated server in vanilla. There is no folder to look in, no inventory to inspect and no skills to reset from the server side.
How items get into a world from outside#
Because the character carries its own inventory, anything a character holds when it connects enters your world. That is a feature: you can take your gear from a friend's world to yours, or keep a character through a world reset, as described in resetting a world and keeping characters. It is also every cheating route in one sentence.
The ways items arrive, from harmless to deliberate:
- From another world, legitimately. The player has played elsewhere. Their bronze armour on day one of your server was earned somewhere else. Vanilla treats this as normal.
- From single player with the cheat set. Load the character into a single-player world, type
devcommands,spawnwhatever you like, quit and connect. The cheat set is refused on a vanilla dedicated server, but nothing stops it offline - the devcommands guide covers what it allows. - From a save editor. Third-party tools edit
.fchfiles directly: skills, inventory, appearance. The server sees only the result. - From a restored file. Copying an older
.fchback over the current one, which brings back whatever that copy held. This is the classic duplication trick, below.
The server cannot tell these apart. To the server, a character wearing a full set of Ashlands gear spawned offline looks exactly like one that earned it on another world.
How duplication happens#
A dupe is an item that now exists twice. In Valheim almost every dupe comes from the same root: the character and the world are saved at different times, by different machines.
The deliberate one
- A player copies their
.fchsomewhere safe. - They join, put their best items into a chest on the server and log out. The character saves without the items; the world saves with them in the chest.
- They copy the old
.fchback. The character has the items again. - They join. The items are now in the chest and in the inventory.
Nothing in vanilla detects this, because from the server's point of view a character simply connected carrying some things.
The accidental one
The same mismatch happens with nobody trying. The world is written to disk every -saveinterval seconds - thirty minutes by default. Characters save on their own schedule, including when a player logs out.
- A player takes iron out of a chest, logs out (their character saves with the iron), and the server is then killed before its next world save. On restart the world is from before the withdrawal: the iron is in the chest and in the inventory.
- The reverse loses items: a player deposits gear, logs out, the server crashes before saving, and the gear is in neither place.
That is why a server that is killed rather than stopped, or a world rolled back to a backup, produces dupes and losses that nobody did on purpose. Shortening the save interval and stopping cleanly reduce both; backups and world corruption covers the save side. A rollback is never neutral for this reason - the world goes back, the characters do not.
What admins can and cannot prevent in vanilla#
Be honest with your group about where the limits are. Here is the actual control a vanilla server gives you:
| You can | You cannot |
|---|---|
Choose who joins with a password and permittedlist.txt | See a player's inventory or skills from the server |
Remove people with kick and ban | Stop items being brought in from other worlds |
| Protect builds and chests with wards | Detect devcommands used in single player |
| Back up and restore the world | Detect an edited or restored .fch |
| Write and enforce rules | Make fresh characters compulsory |
The left-hand column is the real tool. Valheim multiplayer is built as co-operative play among people who trust each other, and the access controls reflect that: a password and an allow list. The allow list in particular changes the question from "how do we stop cheaters" to "who do we let in" - adminlist, bannedlist and permittedlist explains the file.
What you can still notice:
- Gear that does not fit the world. A player with Mistlands gear on a world nobody has left the Black Forest on either played elsewhere or did not. Ask.
- Resources that appear from nowhere. Stacks of iron on a world where nobody has killed The Elder, so nobody can have opened a sunken crypt.
- Implausible speed. A base built overnight with materials nobody gathered.
None of these is proof, which is why a rule with a clear expectation beats detective work. The general approach to evidence and bans is in handling cheaters and ban lists.
House rules for characters#
Most groups need two or three of these, written somewhere everyone has read:
- Fresh characters or not, decided up front. "New characters only for this world" or "bring whatever you have". Either works. Changing the rule after people have joined does not.
- No items brought in, if fresh. A fresh-character rule should also cover the inventory. A new character with a stack of iron from another world is not fresh.
- No `devcommands` on characters used here. Even offline. Spawning gear in single player and walking in with it is the most common form of cheating on group servers.
- No restoring character backups without asking. Players legitimately restore a character after a corrupted file; they should say so, and say what it brought back.
- Report dupes. If a crash leaves someone with double items, they say so and drop the extras in a shared chest.
On a seasonal or community server these go into the rules document and the season announcement - server wipes and seasons covers fresh-character versus carry-over seasons, and onboarding late joiners covers what a new player may reasonably bring into a late-game world. For PvP servers the stakes are higher, because an imported character is a direct advantage over other players; the PvP server guide goes into that.
Server-side character mods#
If the honour system is not enough - a public server, a competitive PvP world, a hardcore community - the fix is to move characters onto the server. That needs a mod, because vanilla has no such feature.
The best known is ServerCharacters, distributed on Thunderstore under the Smoothbrain team. According to its documentation it keeps each player's character profile on the server instead of on their PC, stores inventories on the server to prevent duping, backs up all profiles automatically with a configurable number kept, and creates an emergency backup if a client loses its connection. It also offers options such as limiting each account to one character, a hardcore mode that deletes the server-side save on death, starting templates for new characters, and a maintenance mode that disconnects non-admins. The Thunderstore listing has been marked deprecated at times, and alternatives such as ServerManager by sighsorry handle server-side characters too, so check which is maintained for the current game version before you commit.
What a server-side character mod costs you:
- Every player needs it. ServerCharacters has to be installed on the server and on every client. That rules out Xbox players on a crossplay server, who cannot install mods, and adds another mod to keep in step after game patches - mod version mismatch kicks explains what happens when versions drift.
- The character belongs to the server. That is the point, but it also means players cannot freely take that character to other worlds, and if the server goes or the profile store is lost, so are the characters. Back up the folder where the mod keeps profiles along with the world.
- It is one more thing that can break on patch day. If the mod is not updated for a new game version, nobody plays until it is.
- It covers characters, not everything. A client-side cheat mod can still do things in the world while the player is connected. Server-side characters close the file-editing and import routes, not every route.
For most friend groups none of this is worth it. For a public server where strangers compete for anything, it usually is. Installing it follows the usual BepInEx route in Valheim mods with BepInEx.
Running a server-side character setup#
If you go ahead, a few operational habits make the difference:
- Announce it before switching. Existing characters may not carry over the way players expect. Read the mod's documentation on how it treats a player's first connection and tell the group.
- Back up both halves. The world files and the mod's profile folder belong in the same backup. Restoring one without the other recreates the dupe problem you installed the mod to solve.
- Pin versions. Keep the server and every client on the same mod version. A shared r2modman profile does this well - see Thunderstore and r2modman for groups.
- Hold game updates. Do not update the server on patch day until the character mod has been updated for that version.
On RE:NODE the mod goes in through the file manager or SFTP like any BepInEx mod, and the profile folder sits on the same server as the world, so a backup from the panel captures both together. Backup slots come with every Valheim plan and can be locked, which is worth doing before the first start with a character mod installed. Valheim plans ship with crossplay on, so if your group includes Xbox players, remember that a mod every client must run will keep them out.
FAQ#
Can a Valheim server see what is in a player's inventory?
Not in vanilla. The inventory is part of the character file on the player's machine, and the server only sees the character while it is connected and playing. Server-side character mods change this by storing the profile on the server.
Is bringing a character from another world cheating?
Not by the game's rules - Valheim is designed to let characters travel between worlds. Whether it is allowed on your server is a house rule. Decide it before anyone joins and say it clearly.
Can I stop players using devcommands in single player and bringing items in?
Not in vanilla. Nothing on the server can tell where items came from. Your options are trust, an allow list of people you know, or a server-side character mod that keeps the authoritative copy of each character on the server.
Why do we have duplicate items after a server crash?
Characters and the world save at different times. If the server stopped without saving, the world went back to its last save while characters kept what they had when they logged out. Items moved between chests and inventories in that window now exist twice, or not at all.
Do Xbox players work with ServerCharacters?
No. The mod has to be installed on every client, and Xbox players cannot install mods. A server that relies on it is effectively PC-only, whatever the crossplay setting says.
