Restarts and Player Warnings on Enshrouded
What restarts your Enshrouded server, how players are warned in Discord because the game cannot warn them, start-when-empty, automatic restarts and crashes.
A restart is safe
Enshrouded saves its world when it is stopped properly, and that is how GameGrid stops it: the server is asked to shut down, it writes the world, and it exits. Nothing is lost.
What players lose is the moment of being disconnected, and whatever they were in the middle of: a fight, a glide, a long mining run. Their characters are on their own PCs and are not affected.
What causes a restart
| Cause | When | Can you avoid it? |
|---|---|---|
| You press Restart | Now | Yes |
| You save a setting while the server is running | Straight away: every Enshrouded setting is read only at start, so GameGrid restarts the server to apply it | Save while the server is stopped, or at a quiet time |
| A settings event | When the window opens, and again when it closes | Schedule it well, or let it wait for an empty server |
| A game update | When the update is applied. If anyone is playing it waits a few minutes first | Switch off automatic updates on the Admin page and use Update now at a time you choose |
| Automatic Daily Restart | Only when nobody is online | It never interrupts players |
| Crash recovery | When the server process dies | No, and you want it |
Warnings go to Discord, not into the game
Enshrouded gives a server no way to put a message on a player's screen. No broadcast, no server message, nothing. That is the game, not a GameGrid limitation, and it is why other games' "server restarting in 5 minutes" message has no equivalent here.
So GameGrid warns your players in your Discord alert channel instead:
1. Set up the GameGrid Discord bot in your Discord server: Discord Bot Setup.
2. Choose the channel with /config alert-channel.
3. Tell your players that is where notices appear.
Before each Event Manager restart the bot posts a warning at the times you chose for that event (5 minutes and 1 minute before, unless you change them). When an event is waiting for the server to empty, it posts that too. In-game chat goes the other way, from the game to Discord, so you cannot reply into the game either. See Sending Enshrouded Chat to Discord.
Start when nobody is on
This is the option that does the most good on Enshrouded, precisely because you cannot warn people in game.
When you schedule an event, Start only when nobody is on the server is ticked for you. The event waits for an empty server rather than interrupting whoever is playing. If the server is never empty before the end time, the event is not applied; the restart at the end still happens on time.
GameGrid knows who is on from the server's own player count, so this works without your players doing anything.
| Use it when | Skip it when |
|---|---|
| The event is not time-critical | The event is announced for a specific time |
| Your server has quiet periods | Your server is busy around the clock |
| The change is sharp: difficulty, the tombstone | The change is mild |
If your server is never empty, schedule for the quietest hour you have and announce it in Discord a day ahead.
Every settings event is two restarts
One when the window opens, one when it closes. The game reads its settings only when it starts.
Worth planning around:
- A weekend event costs the same two restarts as a one-hour event. Longer windows are better value.
- A server that is stopped when the window opens or closes stays stopped. GameGrid writes the settings and leaves the server off, so there is no restart. Start it yourself when you want it, and it comes up with whatever the window put in place, or with your original settings once the window has closed. A suspended server does not get the window at all: the event shows as Failed and says why.
- A server can hold only one settings window at a time. A second one that fires while the first is still running is refused, not queued, so overlapping schedules give you one event and a refusal, not two events. Leave a gap for the closing restart.
Automatic Daily Restart
On the Admin page, Automatic Daily Restart restarts your server Every 6 hours, Every 12 hours or Every 24 hours, but only once the interval has passed and nobody is online. It never interrupts a game in progress. The card shows when the last one happened. From Discord, /auto-restart does the same.
On a long-running server it is worth having: it keeps memory use predictable.
If a restart does not come back
The Console is where to look. A server that stops and does not start again is almost always a settings problem introduced just before the restart, which is why saving settings through the panel is safer than editing the file. If the game wrote no log at all, the reason is in logs/stdout.log.
Crash recovery
If the server process dies without being asked to stop, GameGrid starts it again, and the Console records each attempt as a [GameGrid] line ("attempt 1 of 3"). It tries up to three times in ten minutes; if the server still will not stay up, it stops trying and it is flagged for our team.
A crash is not a clean stop, so the world comes back from its last save rather than from the moment it died. Enshrouded saves about every 30 seconds on its own, so at most a short stretch of building is lost.
If the machine fails
Your server's host machine is watched too. If it stops answering for 30 minutes, your server is rebuilt on a healthy machine from its most recent disaster-recovery snapshot; snapshots are taken every 2 hours, so anything since the last one is lost. The Admin page says the same. See Automatic Host Failure Recovery.