Valheim Player Management

Where Player Management Lives

Open the Settings tab for your Valheim server and pick Player Management from the category list on the left. It is a tab inside Settings, not a top-level entry in the sidebar.

It holds three separate lists, each one backed by a plain text file at the root of your server folder: Admin List (adminlist.txt), Permitted List (permittedlist.txt) and Banned List (bannedlist.txt). Click a list to expand it.

Each list shows the identifiers currently in it and a Delete button beside each. To add one, type the identifier in the box and click Add admin, Whitelist player or Ban player.

This is a list editor, not a player roster. It does not show everyone who has ever connected, it has no last-seen column, and there are no promote or demote buttons - you add and remove identifiers. A player who has never connected can still be added, as long as you know their identifier.

Changes are written to the files immediately, but Valheim reads them at startup: restart the server for a change to take effect.

Finding Platform User IDs

Every one of the three lists takes the same thing: a platform prefix, an underscore, then the user id. Type the whole string, including the prefix.

As of Valheim 1.0, the platform prefixes changed to single-letter prefixes. The old Steam_ and Xbox_ prefixes no longer work.

Steam / PC players: V_ followed by the SteamID64, e.g. V_76561198000000000. The bare 17-digit number on its own will not match.

PlayStation 5 players: S_ followed by the Sony account ID.

Nintendo Switch 2 players: N_ followed by the Nintendo account ID.

Xbox / Microsoft Store players: M_ followed by the Xbox account ID.

A player can read their own id from the F2 panel in game, and it also appears in the server log when they connect - open the Console tab and watch for their join line.

There is a platform dropdown beside the input box. It does not compose the identifier for you: whatever you type in the text box is what gets written, so type the full Platform_UserID.

Valheim identifies players by id, never by display name, so there is no way to add someone by their character name.

Admins

Admins can use the in-game console commands (kick, ban, unban, save) and see the F2 player panel. On vanilla servers, admin powers are limited to player management and server commands.

With the Server Devcommands mod, admins can also use cheat commands (god mode, fly, spawn items). See the Admin Commands guide.

To add an admin: open Settings > Player Management, expand Admin List, type the player's Platform_UserID, and click Add admin. Restart the server.

To remove one: click Delete beside the entry, then restart.

You can have multiple admins. There is no limit.

Bans

Banned players are refused. Their Platform_UserID goes in bannedlist.txt.

To ban from the panel: open Settings > Player Management, expand Banned List, type the identifier, and click Ban player. Restart the server for it to take effect.

To ban immediately, without a restart: use the in-game console as an admin - ban [playername] - which acts on the running server there and then.

To unban: click Delete beside the entry and restart, or use the in-game console: unban [playername].

To see all banned players: the Banned List in the panel, or the in-game console command "banned".

Permitted List (Whitelist)

The permitted list is a strict whitelist. While it has any entry in it, only the players on it may join - everyone else is refused, even if they know the password. Leave it empty to let anyone with the password connect.

Important: adding even one player to the permitted list activates the whitelist for everyone. A server with one permitted player and no other entries will reject all other connections.

To enable a whitelist: add each player's Platform_UserID to the Permitted List in Settings > Player Management, then restart.

To disable it: delete every entry from the Permitted List and restart. The server returns to open access.

For most groups, a password is sufficient. Only use the whitelist if you need to restrict access to a specific list of known players - and remember it needs a restart, so add everybody before you restart rather than one at a time.

Max Players

Valheim stops at 10 concurrent players. The number is compiled into the game: there is no setting and no launch argument for it.

GameGrid can raise it by installing Azumatt's MaxPlayerCount plugin on your server. It is server-side only - it patches the server's own capacity gate, so unmodified clients join normally, Xbox and crossplay players included, and nobody installs anything. Open a support ticket to ask for it; there is no self-serve control for it in the panel today.

Once the plugin is present, a Max Players field appears in Settings under System. It allows up to 64. GameGrid supports up to 16, and above that the field carries a performance warning: Valheim servers commonly show position desync and rubber-banding past roughly that point. It takes effect on the next restart.

Until the cap is raised, an eleventh player is refused. There is no queue - they wait and retry.