Windrose Plus Server Query & Status API
What the Windrose Plus "Server Query" module actually publishes, where to read it, and why it does not put your server in the Steam server browser.
What this actually is — read this first
The Windrose Plus setting called "Server Query" does not add a Steam/A2S query responder, and it does not make your server appear in the Steam server browser, on Battlemetrics, or in any community server list. If you have read otherwise anywhere, including in earlier versions of this article, that was wrong.
What it does do is publish your server’s live status as JSON. The module reads the server’s state from inside the game on a timer and writes it to a file, and the Windrose Plus dashboard serves that file at /api/status. There is no network listener and no additional port involved.
That JSON carries the server name, the Windrose build, the Windrose Plus version, whether a password is set, the player limit, the current player list and the active multipliers.
Where to read it
The Windrose Plus dashboard itself is the easiest place: the console view shows the server name, version, invite code, player count against the maximum, the live player list and the active multipliers, all of which come from this module.
For a script, the dashboard’s /api/status endpoint returns the same thing as JSON. Every dashboard endpoint except /api/health is authenticated: reached through the panel’s proxy that is your GameGrid session, and a caller reaching the dashboard directly on the game host logs in with the RCON password instead.
Note that the dashboard port is firewalled to the host itself, so /api/status is not reachable from your own machine over plain HTTP. The dashboard is served through the platform’s authenticated HTTPS proxy instead — see Windrose Plus RCON Dashboard Guide.
GameGrid’s own player count for a Windrose server does not come from this module at all. The platform sends an A2S_PLAYERS query to your server’s query port (your base port + 1) and uses what the game itself answers; that is what the Players figure on the Overview tab and the player-aware automatic restart both read.
The settings
Enable Server Query (default true): turns the status writer on. With it off, /api/status and the dashboard’s player list go stale.
Poll Interval (active), default 5000 ms, range 1000 to 60000: how often the status is refreshed while players are online.
Poll Interval (idle), default 30000 ms, range 5000 to 300000: how often it is refreshed while the server is empty.
Both are saved without a server restart. The defaults are right for almost everyone; raise them if you are chasing CPU on a heavily loaded server, and accept that the dashboard’s numbers then lag by that much.
If you want a public server listing
Windrose does not put dedicated servers in a browsable list. The game’s own discovery is the invite code, brokered through its Connection Service, and the alternative is handing out your address directly.
Which of those applies to your server is decided by "Use Direct Connection" on the Settings tab. See How to Connect to Your Windrose Server.
For a community-facing status page, poll GameGrid’s own Customer API instead: GET /servers/{id} and GET /servers/{id}/realtime-stats give you state, player count and load with a key holding servers:read. See Customer API Reference.
Turning it off
Set "Enable Server Query" to false on the Windrose Plus tab and press "Save Changes". The change takes effect without a restart.
The only thing you lose is the dashboard’s live status and player list, and /api/status for any script reading it. Nothing about how players find or join your server changes, because this module was never involved in that.