The Enshrouded Console and Server Log

There is no command box, and that is the game

Open Console on an Enshrouded server and you get the log, with no box to type into. Under it the page says: "This game has no console to type commands at — its server program does not accept them."

That is not a missing feature. Enshrouded's dedicated server accepts no input at all: no RCON, no telnet, no stdin, no chat commands. There is nothing a command box could send, so GameGrid does not show one that would do nothing.

Everything you would use commands for lives in the panel instead: settings, events, the economy, give, teleport, restarts.

What the Console shows

It follows the server's own log file, logs/enshrouded_server.log, live, from the start of each boot. The page says so: "The log above is the server's own log file, logs/enshrouded_server.log, followed live from the start of this boot." GameGrid adds its own lines to it.

Every line of the game's log starts with a level letter and the time since the server started, for example [I 00:05:07,120]: I is information, W a warning and E an error. A few errors appear on every healthy start (for example about Steam's friends and storage interfaces, which a server does not have) and are nothing to worry about.

Player IP addresses never appear in the Console: any address in a line is shown as [ip-hidden].

The filters

The chips above the log narrow what you see:

Player list opens a Players panel beside the log: who is online, and recent joins and leaves. Copy and Download .log take the lines currently shown, and Clear view empties this view only; the server's log is untouched.

GameGrid's own lines

[GameGrid] lines say what the platform did, in plain words, so the Console is never blank:

• a start, a stop being asked for, and whether the server stopped cleanly or had to be stopped by force
• a crash, each automatic restart attempt ("attempt 1 of 3"), and whether recovery worked
• scheduled restarts
• backups starting and finishing
• settings events applying and reverting
• mods applied or not, and the Inventory & Storage settings applied to the game data
• Server is ready: players can join.

Reading a join

GameGrid writes one clear line per join:

[GameGrid] <character> joined (<Steam name> on Steam, <SteamID64>).

The first name is the character, from GameGrid's server module, then the Steam name and the player's 17-digit SteamID64. When the character and Steam names are the same it reads (Steam <SteamID64>) instead, and when the character name is not known yet it says "A player". When the player leaves you see [GameGrid] <character> left (...) with the reason, such as a timeout.

The game's own lines around it are the detail. One of them reads Player '<Steam name>' logged in with Permissions:, followed by one line per permission. That list tells you which group's password they used, and it is how you check a report like "a guest is editing my base" without guessing: if the list includes CanEditBase, their password was not the Guest one.

You will count six permissions there while the Settings page offers five. The extra one is CanReceiveEXP, which Enshrouded's settings file cannot set: the game drops the key, so every group has it. Nothing is wrong. See User Groups, Passwords and Permissions.

The SteamID64 in the join line is what you need to link a player by hand: Linking Discord Accounts to Enshrouded Players.

Chat in the console

Enshrouded writes no chat to its log at all. The [Chat] lines come from GameGrid's server module, which reads the chat inside the server process.

The module names who spoke, so each line carries the player's name however many people are online. On a server still running an older module build, lines are named only while one player is online, and with more on they read [Chat] a player: text.

Chat is one-way: you can read it, and send it on to Discord, but nothing can be posted back into the game. See Sending Enshrouded Chat to Discord.

When the console is the first thing to check

If the game wrote nothing at all, it rejected its settings file before it opened its log. Enshrouded then prints the reason only to its standard output, which GameGrid keeps in logs/stdout.log: open it in Files. See Your Enshrouded Server Won't Start.

The settings read-back

At every start the server prints the gameplay values it is actually using, after a line [server] Game Settings '...'. When a settings event changes your settings, GameGrid reads that block after the restart and compares it with what the event asked for. If they differ, the event is failed and your settings are put back, rather than a weekend quietly running on values nobody chose.

The numbers in that block are not all human-friendly: the game prints most factors as hexadecimal (3f000000 is 0.5, 40000000 is 2) and durations in nanoseconds. The Settings page is the readable version; the block is the proof.

Older log files

The server moves its previous log aside at every start, so the Console always shows the current boot. Look back through Files:

See Files and FTP on Your Enshrouded Server.

What the console is not

• Not a chat window. You cannot reply to a player from it.
• Not a command line. See above.
• Not a crash report. A crash shows GameGrid's recovery lines; the cause is usually further up the log.

Where to go next

• Your Enshrouded Server Won't Start
• Managing Players on Enshrouded
• Console Guide — the Console page on every game