A RuneScape: Dragonwilds world is a single .sav file, and your group's entire history is in it. Here is where it lives on your server, how the game saves it, what the Backups tab protects, and the clean way to restore.
Where your world lives
Per Jagex's guide, the server keeps its worlds in:
RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames
Browse there on the Files tab or over SFTP. Each world is one .sav. The file holds everything about the world, including its rules — difficulty and similar settings are stored in the save, not in the server's configuration.
Jagex's guide describes moving and backing up the world file only; it says nothing about character data living on the server.
Two other paths worth knowing:
RSDragonwilds/Saved/Logs/RSDragonwilds.log— the server log. The server's version is near the top; it must match the game's.RSDragonwilds/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/DedicatedServer.ini— the configuration file. Manage it from the Server Settings tab rather than editing it here.
How saving works
Jagex's guide does not document when the server writes the file, and it describes no automatic backup — its advice for a self-hosted server is to copy the save out of Savegames to another drive, your PC or the cloud. On Connect, treat the Backups tab, and the copies you download yourself, as the guarantees.
What the Backups tab covers
The Backups tab snapshots the whole server — the Savegames folder, the configuration and the logs together. Backups can be taken by hand here or on a schedule from the Schedules tab; either kind restores with one click. Your plan includes a set number of backup slots — when they are all used, delete an old backup before taking a new one.
Take a manual backup before:
- a game update you expect to be large,
- uploading a different world or changing the World Name,
- handing out the admin password to someone new.
Restoring returns the whole server to that snapshot. Anything that happened after it is gone, so restore deliberately, with the server stopped.
Downloading the world yourself
A backup you hold is the one nobody can take away. On the Files tab, open RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames and download the .sav. Do it with the server stopped so the file is not mid-write. A copy in your local SaveGames folder (C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\RSDragonwilds\Saved\SaveGames on Windows) is also a world you can host from the game again.
Restoring: the clean sequence
- Stop the server.
- Backups tab → choose the snapshot → Restore.
- Start the server and let the console settle.
- Have one player search the world and confirm it is what you expected before announcing it.
To restore just the world rather than the whole server, stop the server, upload your own copy of the .sav into Savegames with its original name, and start — the steps are in Upload a world.
Keeping your settings across updates
Your server checks Steam for the current game build on every restart, and a Steam update can rewrite DedicatedServer.ini with a default template. That is handled: the INI is copied aside before each update and restored if the update changed it, so your Player ID, World Name and passwords survive every patch. You do not need to back the configuration up separately — but the Backups tab includes it anyway.
A note on save corruption at 1.0
Jagex's 1.0.0.4 notes (18 September 2026) say a fix was applied for "World Saves becoming corrupted when exiting a game session", and the 1.0.0.5 notes say Jagex is still investigating save corruption and testing ways to restore missing saves. Jagex has not said whether dedicated-server worlds are affected, so we make no claim either way — but it is one more reason to keep a backup you can restore from. If your world will not load after a patch, stop the server, restore the most recent good backup, and open a ticket with the date the world was last known good so we can help identify the right snapshot.
Related
- Moving a world in: Upload a world
- Every setting on the tab: Server Settings