Your Enshrouded server runs Keen's official dedicated server on our Linux fleet. It comes up with a generated name and generated passwords, so the first job is to decide what those should be and send the right password to the right people. This is the path from checkout to your group standing at the flame together.
1. Find your server
Open your dashboard and select the new Enshrouded service. The Overview tab shows the server's status and the live console. The Server Settings tab holds every value the game reads from enshrouded_server.json.
2. Name it and set the slots
On Server Settings:
- Server name — what players search for in the in-game browser. Keep it distinctive and easy to paste.
- Player slots — up to your plan's cap: 8 on Ember, the full 16 on Flame and Inferno. Sixteen is the game's own limit.
- Game settings preset — Default, Relaxed, Hard, Survival or Custom.
- Voice chat / text chat — on or off, and Proximity or Global for voice.
Save. Every change applies on the next start. The full list is in Server Settings.
3. Read the passwords
Enshrouded has no single server password. Access is by roles — Keen calls them user groups — and each role has its own password. Your server ships with an Admin role (kick and ban) and a Friend role, each with a generated password, and you can add more. The password a player enters in the browser decides which role they join as.
Keep the Admin password to yourself and the people you would trust to ban someone. Send the Friend password to the group. Both are on the Server Settings tab; change either there if you would rather pick your own. Detail in Roles and passwords.
4. Restart and watch the console
Restart from the Overview tab and watch the console. On every start the server checks Steam for the current game build first — Enshrouded servers stop being joinable when their build differs from the players', so this is what keeps yours joinable after each patch. The server is fully up when the console shows:
[Session] 'HostOnline' (up)!
followed shortly by a [server] Load deserialization took … line. Until then, a search finds nothing.
5. Get your group in
Each player, on PC:
- Open Enshrouded and go to the server browser.
- Search for the server name from the Server Settings tab — paste it, do not retype it.
- Enter the password for their role. Friend password for friends, Admin for admins.
Your server's two UDP ports are assigned at checkout and shown on the Overview tab; there is nothing to forward on your side. Players find the server by searching its name in the in-game browser and entering their role's password.
6. Bringing a world you already have
If your group has a world hosted from someone's PC or another server, you can move it in: upload it to the savegame folder with the server stopped. Characters do not move — Keen stores character progress on each player's own machine — so your friends bring their own. Step by step in Upload your world.
7. Before you invite everyone
- Builds must match. Players update through Steam; the server updates on restart. After a game patch, restart the server. With 1.0 landing on Steam on 15 October 2026 (Keen), plan a restart that day.
- Take a backup. The Backups tab snapshots the whole server; take one before your first experiment. See Backups and saves.
- Guard the Admin password. Anyone who has it can kick and ban.
If something is not right
- Nobody can find or join the server → work through Players can't join. It starts with the build check and the password check, which between them cover most cases.
- A player is in but cannot build → they joined with a role that lacks base-edit rights. Send them the right password and have them rejoin.
- Anything else → open a ticket from your dashboard and paste the last lines of the console.