Windrose Co-op and Multiplayer Guide

How Windrose Multiplayer Works

Windrose is a co-op survival adventure set in the Age of Piracy. Players work together to build bases, craft ships, explore islands, and fight enemies on land and sea. On GameGrid the player limit is yours to set — see below.

On a GameGrid dedicated server, the server runs continuously and players can connect and disconnect at any time. The world persists even when no players are online.

There is nothing on a GameGrid Windrose server that turns PvP on or off — the game exposes no such setting, so neither the Settings tab nor Windrose Plus has one. Every difficulty and multiplier control you get is about enemies and enemy ships.

Player Limits

Windrose’s player limit on GameGrid is the "Max Player Count" setting on the Settings tab. It accepts 1 to 64 and a new server ships at 8. The platform imposes no cap of its own — that range is the game’s.

What a server will actually carry is a hardware question. Our own sizing guidance for Windrose is roughly 8 GB of RAM for 2 players, 12 GB for 4 and 16 GB for 10, with an SSD strongly recommended. A number the setting accepts is not a promise the game runs well there, so raise it in steps and watch the Resource Usage card on the Overview tab as you do.

The setting is marked as needing a restart, so restart the server after changing it.

With Windrose Plus, you can adjust co-op scaling settings to control how enemy difficulty scales with additional players. This helps maintain balance with larger groups.

Each additional player adds CPU load, memory and bandwidth. The Resource Usage card on the Overview tab shows your own game process’s figures, refreshed every 10 seconds, which is the place to watch as you raise the limit.

Inviting Players

There are two ways to invite players to your Windrose server:

A direct connection: share the Server Address from 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. This needs "Use Direct Connection" turned on in the Settings tab, under Network.

An invite code: share the "Invite Code" from the Settings tab, under Basic. This works only while "Use Direct Connection" is OFF — turning direct connection on disables codes. Invite-code joins are brokered through the game’s Connection Service.

The two are mutually exclusive, so decide which one your server uses before you hand anything out. A direct connection is the lower-latency option because it goes straight to the host.

Connection Service Regions

The "User Selected Region" setting on the Settings tab picks which of the game’s Connection Service regions your server registers with: SEA, CIS or EU — EU covers both Europe and North America. Left empty, the server picks the region with the best latency for itself.

It only matters for invite-code connections. A direct connection ignores the Connection Service entirely.

If invite codes are failing for some players and not others, region is the first thing to check. Switching the server to direct connections sidesteps the Connection Service altogether.

Tips for Smooth Multiplayer

GameGrid lists East US, Mid US and West US as locations, but only East US has capacity today — the other two show as sold out at checkout. Latency for players a long way from the US east coast is a fact of that, not something a setting can fix.

Use direct IP connections for the lowest latency. Invite codes may route through relay servers, adding latency.

If you have Windrose Plus, its live map refreshes player positions every 5 seconds and entity positions every 30 by default. Raising those intervals on the WindRose Plus tab is the cheapest way to reduce what the mod costs you with several players online.

Automatic restarts are already on: the Admin tab offers 6, 12 or 24 hours, and the restart is skipped entirely while any player is online, so it never interrupts a session.

Communicate with your players about update timing. When you restart the server for a Windrose update, all players must update their clients to reconnect.