If your group's RuneScape: Dragonwilds world started on someone's PC, you can move it to your Connect server and keep everything: the buildings, the progress, and the world's rules. It is one file, one folder, and one rule about the file's name.
Why the world file matters twice
A Dragonwilds world is a single .sav. Besides your progress, it holds the world's rules — difficulty and the like. Per Jagex's guide there is no difficulty setting in the server's configuration; to run a custom-rules server you create the world locally with the settings you want and transfer the save. So uploading a world is also how you set the rules.
Step 1: find the save on the PC
Jagex's guide gives the location on Windows:
C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\RSDragonwilds\Saved\SaveGames
Paste it into File Explorer's address bar with your Windows user name in place of <your name> — AppData is hidden, so clicking through does not work. Each world is a .sav. If there are several, the newest by date modified is the one you last played.
Close the game before copying. A save copied mid-write can be incomplete.
Coming from another host instead? Same move: download the .sav from the old server's RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames folder and carry on from Step 2. If the old host makes the files hard to reach, open a ticket and we will help.
Step 2: do not rename it
Keep the file's name exactly as the game wrote it — same name, same case, .sav extension. The community wiki's transfer instructions put this in capitals, and it matters here because the name is how players find the world: the search in Worlds → Public is exact and case sensitive, and for an uploaded world the name to search may be the save file's name rather than the World Name field.
Step 3: upload it to the server
The server folder, per Jagex's guide, is:
RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames
- Stop the server from the Overview tab.
- Open the Files tab, browse to
RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames, and upload the.sav. Or connect over SFTP with the details on the Overview tab and drop the file into the same folder. - Start the server.
If a world with the same name already exists in the folder, decide which one you want before uploading: the upload replaces it. Download the existing one first if there is any doubt.
Step 4: find it in the game
Open Worlds → Public and search the world's exact, case-sensitive name. If you set a World Password on the Server Settings tab, players are asked for it — that password overrides any password saved inside the world when it was created locally.
Things that go wrong
- Not in the browser at all. Check the version first: the server's build must match the game's. Restart the server (it updates on restart) and compare the version near the top of the console with the game's top-left corner. Then check the search: pasted, exact case, the save file's name. Full list in Players can't join.
- Wrong rules. The rules were wrong in the world you copied. Recreate it locally with the settings you want and upload that save.
- Old progress. You copied a stale save; check date modified and upload the newest.
- Renamed file. Put the original name back.
Taking the world home
The same folder works in reverse. Download the .sav from RSDragonwilds/Saved/Savegames on the Files tab and drop it into your local SaveGames folder, and you can host it from the game again. This is also a fine manual backup — see Backups & saves for the automatic kind.
Console worlds
Jagex has not published a way to export a world from a PlayStation 5, Switch 2 or Xbox, so we cannot give a procedure for moving one.
Related
- Every setting on the tab: Server Settings
- Fresh server walkthrough: Getting started