A Vintage Story world is a single file with the extension .vcdbs. Moving a world to your Connect server means uploading that file to data/Saves and telling the server to load it. This page covers worlds from the official server and from single player.
Where your world is now
On the official server. The developer's server rental lets you download your world, and its store page says you can still do so for 180 days after the rental ends. It does not take uploads: in the developer's words, "There is currently no process in place to allow for uploading of worlds." Download the world and bring it here.
In single player. Your saves are in the Saves folder of the game's data folder: %appdata%\VintagestoryData\Saves on Windows, or ~/.config/VintagestoryData/Saves on Linux. Each world is one .vcdbs file. Close the game before you copy it.
A world you have not made yet. The game's wiki suggests creating a custom world in single player, with the advanced world creation options, and then uploading it to use as your server world.
Upload it
- Take a backup on the Backups tab, so the current world is safe.
- Stop the server.
- Upload the
.vcdbsfile intodata/Saves. The Files tab handles small worlds. A savegame can grow to a few GB as players explore, and for a file that size SFTP is the better tool.
Make it the active world
On the Server Settings tab, pick the uploaded world as the active world and save. Start the server.
To do it by hand, open data/serverconfig.json on the Files tab while the server is stopped. Under WorldConfig, the SaveFileLocation line is the world the server loads at start. Change only the file name at the end of that path to your uploaded file's name, save, and start the server. Two things to watch:
SaveFileLocationpoints at the world "which should be loaded on server start (or created if not exists)". So a typo in the name does not fail: the server makes a brand-new world under that name instead. If your group spawns into an unfamiliar landscape, check the spelling.- Keep the quotation marks and the comma at the end of the line. The file is JSON, and the server cannot read it with either missing.
The old world stays in data/Saves. Point SaveFileLocation back at it to switch back.
Check it worked
Join and look around, or run /info seed in the console and compare it with the seed you know. /info createdversion shows the game version the world was first created in.
Players still need the same game version as the server to join. See Players can't join if anyone is turned away.
Worlds with mods
A world from the official server has no third-party mods, because the official server does not allow them. It is ready to load as it is, and you can add mods to it afterwards: take a backup first, as the game's wiki advises before adding mods. A single-player world that used mods needs the same mods on the server before it starts, so install them first. See Adding mods to your server.
Disk space
The game shuts the server down when less than 400 MB of disk is left, a safety setting in its config. Old worlds you keep in data/Saves count towards your disk, so download and delete the ones you no longer play.
Related
- Why owners move worlds here: Moving off the official Vintage Story server
- Plans and disk: Plans & resources