How to set up a dedicated Valheim server

A dedicated Valheim server keeps the tenth world alive without your PC staying on: your friends explore whenever they like, and progress is shared. Here's what to know before launching one — including two Valheim quirks nobody warns you about.

The password isn't optional, and it has rules

Valheim requires a server password. It isn't a security setting you can leave blank: without one, the server won't start.

Two constraints come from the game itself:

• five characters minimum;
• it must not be contained in the server's name. That's a Valheim rule, not ours: a server called thors-place with the password thor is refused at startup.

Here it's generated automatically per server and shown in your console — pass it to your group along with the address.

Crossplay is on by default, and it changes how people join

This is Valheim's most confusing quirk, and it's worth understanding before someone loses their temper.

• A Steam player always joins by address: Join Game → Join IP, the address, the password.
• A console or Game Pass player has no "address" field in their interface. They join with a join code — a number shown in your TickServ console.

Crossplay is enabled by default here, precisely because the opposite default is a trap: without crossplay, a PS5, a Switch 2 or an Xbox cannot join at all, and nobody guesses there's a box to tick. For a Steam player, crossplay changes nothing.

⚠️ The join code changes every time the server starts. Don't put it in a pinned message: read it from your console each session. The address, by contrast, is stable. The details are in the crossplay guide.

Iron Gate documents how dedicated servers work, crossplay included, in its official guide.

The first boot takes eight to ten minutes

Measured on a real machine: about five minutes downloading the server from Steam — the binary is 1.75 GB and doesn't live in the data volume, so it's supplied fresh each session — then three minutes generating the world for a new map.

Generation varies with the seed and the processor load: on a shared vCPU it can run past those three minutes. Don't kill it thinking it failed. Later sessions are shorter, the world already being generated.

The server isn't in the public list, and that's deliberate

The "visible in the public list" setting is off by default. Your server isn't listed in the community browser: people get in by address (or code), with the password.

That's the right default for a game among friends — a publicly listed server attracts visitors who only need to guess a five-character password. You can turn it on if you want to run an open server.

How much RAM?

Valheim is modest compared with modded Minecraft, but its appetite grows with the area of map explored: the server holds everything you've discovered in memory.

The tier we recommend for Valheim is 8 GB — it's the one marked as recommended at creation, and the sensible default for a group that plays regularly.

The 4 GB tier will run a small group on a young map, and it stays selectable: the console will simply warn you that you're going below the recommended tier. That's a warning, not a block — your call, knowing that it's explored surface, not player count, that drives the memory bill.

You can change tier whenever you like without losing the game. And if it stutters while RAM is comfortable, it's the processor: the dedicated CPU level exists for that.

What's kept, and what isn't

The world and your characters are archived before every shutdown and restored on the next boot, with an automatic backup every 30 minutes while you play, of which the most recent is kept — six staggered up to seven days back with the backup option.

Valheim has no remote administration console — no RCON, unlike Minecraft or Factorio. Commands happen in-game. That isn't a limitation on our side: the Valheim server doesn't expose one.

Worth knowing too: the server saves on its own at intervals and on shutdown, so archiving always catches a coherent world. Since 1.0 a world is no longer a pair of files but a folder split into chunks — the conversion happens by itself on first boot, and we measured it on a real machine.

If you're self-hosting

Three things that waste time, met while actually running these servers:

• The ports are UDP: 2456 for the game, 2457 for queries, 2458. Probing 2456 over TCP tells you nothing.
• In crossplay, the server never answers Steam A2S queries. It's reachable, players get in, but any monitoring tool relying on A2S will think it's dead. Measured on a real machine. The only reliable signal then is the session line the server writes to its logs, carrying its join code and player count.
• The binary must not live in the backup volume: Steam reinstalls it on every start. What matters to keep is worlds_local.

Migrating an existing game

If you already have a world, grab it from Valheim's worlds_local folder: the two files <YourWorld>.db and <YourWorld>.fwl before 1.0, the whole world folder since (1.0 gives every world its own subfolder and breaks the .db into pieces). Zip it, import the archive at creation: it's filed in the right place for you. When in doubt, zip all of worlds_local — a forgotten file is a world that won't load.

The same-name folder trap, worth knowing before you zip. Next to worlds_local, Valheim keeps a folder named exactly like your world — and that one holds only the map cache (cacheMinimapBiome, cacheMinimapHeight, cacheMinimapMask, cacheMinimapMeta). Two customers fell for it on the same morning in September 2026: they zipped the right name, but the wrong folder. Here is what a real 1.0 world holds, read off our own servers: _main.<n>.fwl2, _main.<n>.db2, _main.<n>.chunks, _main.<n>.ok, and a set of *.chunk files (1e_1e__1_5.chunk…). If you don't see those, you don't have the world.

Shutting down when you're done

Server off = €0. Auto-stop fires on its own once nobody is connected, and you're never cut off mid-game while a player is there. World storage is free.

Create your Valheim server. Your first hour of play is free.