Enshrouded 1.0 is here, and your server is ready

Enshrouded 1.0 landed on October 15, nearly three years after it first turned up in early access. If you have been holding out for the full release before pulling friends into the Shroud, this is the week.

If you already run an Enshrouded server with us, the short version is easy. Your Enshrouded 1.0 server is already on the new build, it boots, and every setting in the panel finally does what it says. Your world, saves and bases are exactly where you left them. Nothing here asks you to start over.

The longer version is worth a few minutes, because we rebuilt a fair bit to get to 1.0, and two or three of the new settings come with a catch worth knowing before you flip them.

Your Enshrouded 1.0 server is already on the new build

Start with the part that matters most. Servers that used to be a coin toss at startup now come up every time.

On the old setup a cold start succeeded maybe one time in ten, sometimes worse. The process would sit at zero percent CPU, never writing a line to its own log, and you restarted and hoped. After the rebuild, five of five cold starts came up clean. The cause was down in the plumbing. Enshrouded ships a Windows-only server binary, and running it on Linux through Proton tripped over a display requirement and a Steamworks version bump that 1.0 introduced. If your server ever threw a version mismatch or just hung on boot, that is the family of problem we fixed.

The full teardown is its own post, for anyone who wants it. For now, it boots. If yours ever does not come back after an update, open a ticket and we will climb in. On our side it just comes up.

Every setting is in the panel now, and this time they actually apply

This is the one most of you came for.

The old panel showed a few fields, Server Name, Max Players, Server Password, a Steam Query Port, and changing them did nothing. The old setup never wrote your changes into enshrouded_server.json, so the real settings only lived in a file you opened by hand in the file manager. If you ever searched for why your Enshrouded dedicated server settings were not changing, that was why. It was not you.

That is over. The new panel maps 46 keys in enshrouded_server.json straight to fields: fifty-five variables in all, fifty-one visible, forty-five writing directly to the config. Change a value, restart, and it is live. No file manager, no editing a config file by hand, no JSON to keep in sync. Enshrouded server settings are finally just settings.

Difficulty presets, and the one thing that trips everyone up

The Enshrouded difficulty settings all sit under one field now, Difficulty Preset, with five choices: Default, Relaxed, Hard, Survival, and Custom. The first four are Keen's own built-in profiles, so Hard means exactly what the game means by Hard.

Here is the catch, and it is what people get wrong most. The thirty-eight individual sliders below only do anything when the preset is set to Custom. On any other preset the game ignores them. Set it to Relaxed and then carefully dial in your own enemy damage and XP rates, and none of it takes hold. Flip the preset to Custom first, then tune. It works like Valheim's world preset, where the switch at the top overrules everything under it.

The 38 settings you can actually tune

With the preset on Custom the whole board opens up. Each of these used to mean hand-editing JSON. Now they are fields, grouped so you are not scrolling a wall.

• Player. Health, mana and stamina multipliers, body heat, dive time, and how long you last in the Shroud. A weapon durability toggle too, and off means weapons never break, usually the first thing a group changes. Plus hunger and starvation, if you want survival to bite or not.
• Death and curse. What you drop on death, from materials only, to your whole backpack, to nothing. And the Shroud curse chance, off to doubled.
• World and time. Day and night length, two to sixty minutes each, weather frequency, and the Flame Altar level that sets how far the Shroud is pushed back.
• Progression and economy. XP split three ways, combat, mining, and exploration and quests, each tunable on its own, with mining XP you can zero out. Then mining yield, plant growth, loot stack size, crafting speed, and the share of runes you get back on salvage.
• Enemies. Damage, health, stamina and perception, swing rate, and how many can gang up at once. Spawn amount runs from Few up to Extreme, or Automatic, which scales each fight to nearby players. Bosses carry their own damage and health, so you can keep the world gentle and the boss fights mean.
• Other. Fishing difficulty, a glider turbulence toggle (off is the old pre-update gliding), and how much a spooked animal costs your taming progress.

That is the shape of it. Whether you want the best Enshrouded dedicated server settings for a hardcore run or a relaxed building world, the dials are here. Groups also ask about personal versus shared progression, how quests and unlocks get tracked across one world; that has its own docs page worth reading first. The full field-by-field reference lives in the docs, not here.

Three passwords instead of one, and why a reinstall applies them

The single Server Password field is gone, and good riddance, because Enshrouded stopped reading that top-level password key back in Update 2. It had been dead for ages whatever the old panel implied.

In its place is the permission system the game actually uses, three roles, each with its own password:

• Admin. Everything. Kick and ban, open any inventory, edit the world, build and extend bases.
• Friend. Inventories, editing the world, editing bases, but no extending bases and no touching the Flame Altar.
• Guest. Open world only, no chests, no building. Leave the Guest password empty and the server is public.

Admins also get reserved slots, so you can get into your own server when all sixteen seats are full.

One caveat, said plainly, because it is the single surprise here. Changing a role password or a reserved-slot count applies through Settings, then Reinstall Server. That sounds scarier than it is. The reinstall keeps your world, saves and files untouched and only rewrites the permission block. The reason is dull, Pterodactyl's JSON editor cannot write list entries, so the install script owns that part of the file. Change a password, run the reinstall, done, and nothing you built moves.

Voice and text chat

Two more the old setup never had. Voice Chat switches on as Proximity, so you only hear nearby players, or Global for the whole server. Text Chat is a plain on or off. Both ship off, so turn them on if your group wants them.

Ports and bad values get caught before they bite

Enshrouded dedicated server setup used to include a small trap, a blank, required Steam Query Port you had to fill in yourself, with nothing stopping a number that did not match your allocation. Gone. The query port is written automatically from the port we allocate you, so there is nothing to type and nothing to mismatch, and since a hosted server has no home router in front of it, the usual port forwarding scramble is not yours to do.

The other fields check themselves too. Max Players is capped at sixteen, Enshrouded's real limit and Keen's call, not ours, so how many players a server holds has a firm answer. Names stop at sixty-four characters, passwords want four to sixty-four, and every multiplier is boxed to a sane range, enemy damage 0.25 to 5, boss health 0.2 to 5. Put in something the game cannot use and the panel tells you then and there, instead of handing you a server that quietly refuses to start or never shows up in the browser.

How much RAM an Enshrouded server really needs

This is the one number worth getting right, because the category inflates it. Search around and you will be told to rent twelve, sixteen, even thirty-two gigabytes for a full group. Those are whole-machine figures from people running the server on their own desktop alongside everything else, and they are the most oversold numbers in Enshrouded server hosting.

Here is what it actually uses. Keen's own dedicated-server documentation puts the server near 4.4GB idle, plus about 100MB per player, which lands a completely full sixteen-player server under 6GB. We watched our own fleet to check, and ours ran lighter still, between 1.0 and 1.3 GiB with players on a fresh world. Either way, the honest answer to the Enshrouded dedicated server requirements question is that memory is not what you run out of. Our base plan starts at 6GB, covers Keen's full cap, and you can add more later without rebuilding anything.

There are proper docs now

All of this is written up for real in the Enshrouded docs: the full forty-five-setting reference with every range, the Custom-preset catch, the reinstall step for passwords, connecting, the lot. If something in the panel makes you tilt your head, start there. A blog post is for deciding, the docs are for doing.

Starting fresh for 1.0?

That is the whole changelog. If you are standing up a new server for the launch rather than updating one you already run, this part is for you, and yes, it is the pitch.

There is an annual option too, Flex, that works out cheaper per month and throws in three GameSwap freeze slots, so you can park a world and come back to it later. Either way you are on the 1.0 build from the first boot, in Dallas or three other locations, up in a few minutes.

We do this every launch. We ran the same playbook the day Valheim hit 1.0: show up, test it both ways, put the new settings in the panel, and write down what is worth knowing.

And once more, because it is the nervous question. If you already have a world with us, everything above leaves your saves and bases exactly as they are. Go enjoy 1.0. You have waited long enough for it.