Scheduling Automatic Restarts for Your 7DtD Server

Why Regular Restarts Help

7 Days to Die accumulates entities and memory over a long uptime. Servers that run for days start to feel heavy - lower framerate for players, longer chunk loads, the occasional crash.

A restart clears that. For a busy server, every 6 or 12 hours is sensible; a quiet one is fine at 24.

A restart also puts the server back on whatever config was last saved, which is where non-restart-required settings changes take effect.

Automatic Restarts on GameGrid

This lives on the Admin tab, in the card called "Automatic Daily Restart". It is not in Settings.

Three intervals are offered: every 6 hours, every 12 hours, or every 24 hours. Pick one and it saves immediately - there is no separate save button and no time-of-day option.

The card also shows when the last automatic restart happened, once there has been one.

The interval is measured from when the server process started, not from midnight. A server that has just been restarted by hand starts its clock again.

It Only Restarts an Empty Server

This is the part worth understanding. The automatic restart fires only when the interval has elapsed AND nobody is connected.

Your server is checked every five minutes. If players are on, the restart is skipped and checked again at the next pass, so a server that is busy around the clock may go a long time without an automatic restart.

If the player count cannot be determined at that moment, the restart is also skipped. The platform would rather wait than drop somebody mid-horde.

Because of that, nobody is disconnected by an automatic restart. There is no in-game warning either - there is nobody to warn.

If your server never empties out and you need a scheduled restart regardless, open a support ticket and say so.

Restarting by Hand

The Start, Stop and Restart buttons are in the status bar at the top of every page of your server, so you never have to go looking for them.

To restart politely, warn people first from the Console tab:

say "Server restarting in 5 minutes - please get somewhere safe."

Wait, then: say "Server restarting in 1 minute."

Then run saveworld to force a save, and press Restart.

Note that the platform restarts your server for you when you save a setting the panel marks restart-required, so a settings change can be a restart you did not plan. Save those when the server is quiet.

Saving

7 Days to Die saves on its own timer while it runs. There is no auto-save interval setting on your server - it is not one of the settings the panel exposes and it is not one you can set in the config.

saveworld in the Console tab forces an immediate save. Run it before any manual restart, before a wipe, and before taking a manual backup if you want the backup to be right up to date.

A graceful stop from the panel gives the game up to 90 seconds to shut down cleanly, which includes its own save. Use Stop or Restart rather than anything more abrupt.