Getting Started with Your Windrose Server

Creating Your Windrose Server

After logging in to your GameGrid dashboard, click "+ Create New Server" to open the server creation page.

Select "Windrose" from the game dropdown. If you have a game-specific bundle, Windrose will only appear if it is included in your bundle.

Choose a server name. This is displayed in your dashboard and can be changed later from the Settings tab.

Click "Create Server". The card first reads "Setting up" while capacity and a port block are reserved, then provisions while the Windrose dedicated server files are downloaded from Steam and that game’s default settings are written.

How long that takes depends on the download and on whether the host already has a copy of Windrose — game files live once per host and every server of that game links into that one copy, so a second Windrose server on the same host is much quicker than the first. When it finishes the server is left STOPPED on purpose, so you can configure it before anyone can join.

Starting Your Server

From the dashboard, find your Windrose server card and click "Manage" to open the server panel.

Press Start in the status bar. That bar is at the top of every tab of the server panel. The badge changes from "Offline" to "Starting" and then "Online".

The server is ready when the badge turns green and reads "Online". The platform gives Windrose up to 60 seconds to answer its health check on startup, and the Console tab shows the game’s own output while it comes up.

The address is in the Connection Info panel on the Overview tab: the host’s public IP and your allocated port together, for example 203.0.113.50:28100. Give players that whole string.

Start, Stop and Restart are only in that status bar — they are not on the Admin tab. The Admin tab is for updates, automatic restarts and the maintenance actions.

Understanding Windrose Server Ports

Your server is given its own block of 100 ports from the 28000 to 39000 range. Windrose uses two of them: the base port for game traffic and the base port + 1 for its query socket. Both are opened in the host firewall for you.

You cannot change them, and you do not need to: the ports are written into the game’s launch arguments by the platform. Take the address from Connection Info on the Overview tab.

If you enable Windrose Plus, it gets an HTTP port at your base port + 80. That one is firewalled to the game host itself — you reach the dashboard through the "Open Dashboard" link on the WindRose Plus tab, which goes via the platform’s HTTPS front door, not by typing an address into a browser.

See Windrose Port Configuration for the full picture.

First-Time Configuration

Before inviting players, review the Settings tab. Windrose shows 20 settings in six categories, and almost all of them need a restart to take effect — so it is worth doing this before the first start rather than after. Key ones:

Server Name: how the server is labelled on WDCgridgames. Windrose has no browsable server list, so this is not a discovery mechanism — players join with your address or your invite code.

Server Password: Set a password to restrict access, or leave it empty for an open server.

Max Player Count: accepts 1 to 64 and ships at 8. Our sizing guidance for Windrose is roughly 8 GB of RAM for 2 players, 12 GB for 4 and 16 GB for 10, so raise it in steps rather than all at once.

Invite Code and Use Direct Connection: these decide how players get in, and they are mutually exclusive. With Use Direct Connection on, players join with the address and the invite code is ignored; with it off, they join with the code. Every new server is given a random 8-character code.

Next Steps

After your server is running, read our guide on how to connect to your Windrose server to learn the different connection methods.

For advanced features like a live map, admin console, and gameplay multipliers, enable Windrose Plus from the Windrose Plus tab in your server panel.

To customize gameplay settings like difficulty, loot rates, and XP, see our Windrose server settings reference.