ICARUS Prospect Guide: Managing Your Dedicated Server Worlds

ICARUS Prospect Guide: Managing Your Dedicated Server Worlds

A few weeks ago we had a customer ticket that went something like: "I switched my server to a Mission prospect for a Saturday session, and now my Open World base is gone." The base wasn't gone. The prospect file was sitting on disk exactly where they left it. They just didn't know how ICARUS stores worlds, or how to point the server back at the right one. That ticket is the reason this guide exists.

ICARUS doesn't work like other survival games. There is no single persistent world per server. Instead, the server hosts a prospect, which is RocketWerkz's word for one specific instance of one map, with its own save file. You can have a dozen prospect files on disk, but only one is loaded at a time. Once you understand that, almost every confusing thing about running an ICARUS server gets simpler.

The three kinds of prospect

When you create a prospect you pick one of three categories, and the category dictates how the world behaves.

Open World is the sandbox mode most dedicated servers run. No timer, no extraction pressure, the world persists 24/7, and players can come and go. If you're hosting for a community group, this is almost certainly what you want.

Mission is the scripted ICARUS experience: a fixed objective, a real-world countdown timer, and the rule that anything you didn't extract before the timer hit zero is lost. Missions work on a dedicated server, but they're really designed for organised sessions where everyone shows up at the same time, plays through together, and extracts as a group.

Outpost sits between the two. It's a permanent base you can return to between Mission runs, useful if your group likes the timed-mission loop but wants somewhere to stash gear and characters in between.

Character XP, talents and most unlocks travel with the player across prospects, so swapping the active world doesn't reset anyone's progression.

Maps and DLC

The base game ships with Olympus, a free map that every ICARUS owner can play. The other maps are paid DLC: Styx (Styx Expansion), Prometheus (New Frontiers), and Elysium (Dangerous Horizons), the latter released in March 2026 and home to the new Eden NPC settlement. Players generally need to own the relevant DLC before they can join a prospect running on that map, so if your group is mixed, Olympus is the safest starting point.

We won't quote specific feature counts for the DLC maps because the patch notes shift, but Prometheus leans into volcanic and alien biomes, and Elysium is the most resource-hungry of the four. If you're running Elysium for a larger group it's worth picking a higher RAM tier when you order; the ICARUS hosting page has the current options.

Where prospects live on disk

On your dedicated server, prospect saves are in:

Saved/PlayerData/DedicatedServer/Prospects/

Each save is a .prospect file. You can list, rename, copy and download them through the File Manager in the TCAdmin control panel at control.low.ms. On a local single-player install it's a different path:

%localappdata%\Icarus\Saved\PlayerData\<SteamID>\Prospects\

That second path matters because RocketWerkz officially supports moving a single-player prospect onto a dedicated server. They published a Prospect Migration PDF when New Frontiers launched and the same approach still works: copy your local .prospect file into the server's Prospects directory, then point the server at it via ServerSettings.ini. Player character data lives separately, so people will join with their server-side character rather than their SP one, which catches a lot of folks out the first time.

ServerSettings.ini: the keys that actually matter

The config file lives at Icarus/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ServerSettings.ini and you can edit it from Configuration Files in TCAdmin. For prospect work there are really only a handful of keys you need to know:

• LoadProspect — the name of the existing .prospect file you want the server to boot into.
• ResumeProspect — defaults to True. Leave it on if you want the server to resume the saved state of LoadProspect rather than reset it.
• LastProspectName — the server writes this itself to remember the most recently active prospect.
• AllowNonAdminsToLaunchProspects — defaults to True, lets regular players create new prospects from the in-game lobby.
• AllowNonAdminsToDeleteProspects — defaults to False, and we strongly recommend leaving it that way.

To create a brand new prospect from config rather than from the in-game lobby, use CreateProspect. The syntax is space-separated and the map is baked into the prospect type:

CreateProspect=Olympus_Outpost 3 false MyBase

That reads as: prospect type Olympus_Outpost, difficulty 3 (the scale runs 1 to 4), hardcore false, save name MyBase. Swap Olympus_Outpost for the open-world or mission variant you actually want, and the file will appear in the Prospects directory after the server boots.

Don't set LoadProspect and CreateProspect at the same time. Pick one. If both are present the server's behaviour is, charitably, undefined.

Switching prospects without losing anything

This is the workflow we run ourselves and the one we recommend to customers. It assumes you already have at least one prospect saved.

1. Take a backup first. Open Cloud Backup (or Backup Manager) in TCAdmin and trigger a fresh backup before you touch anything. Name it after what you're about to do so future-you can find it.
2. Stop the server from the TCAdmin dashboard.
3. Open Configuration Files, edit ServerSettings.ini, set LoadProspect to the prospect you want, and confirm ResumeProspect=True. Remove any stale CreateProspect line.
4. Start the server and open the Web Console to watch it boot. The log will tell you which prospect it loaded; if it's the wrong one, stop and check the file name matches exactly.
5. Connect in-game and verify the world looks right before you tell anyone else to join.

We usually keep two prospects on disk at any time and rename the inactive one with a date suffix, something like OpenWorld_Olympus_2026-04-01.prospect, so it's obvious which file is current and which is the parking-bay copy. It's not glamorous but it has saved us from "wait, which one was the good one?" more than once.

Backups, properly

Every LOW.MS ICARUS server includes automatic cloud backups, and you can restore any of them in a couple of clicks from Cloud Restore in TCAdmin. That covers the day-to-day. The thing the automatic backups don't cover is the moment right before you do something risky, which is exactly when you want a known-good snapshot. Take a manual backup before switching prospects, applying a game update, or installing mods. It costs you thirty seconds and it has bailed us out repeatedly.

For real paranoia, download the .prospect file itself through File Manager every so often and keep it on your own machine. Server-side backups are robust, but a local copy of the actual world file is the one thing nobody can take away from you.

When prospect files get big

A fresh open-world save is a few megabytes. After a few hundred hours of building it can be hundreds of megabytes, occasionally more. Big files mean longer server boots, longer auto-saves, and longer initial loads for new players joining. ICARUS is built on UE4 and is fairly sensitive to single-thread CPU performance, which is why a chunky save on a busy world can feel heavier than the raw file size suggests.

If your world is starting to drag, the honest answer is usually one of two things: bump up to a higher RAM tier so the server has more headroom, or tear down structures the group no longer uses. Occasionally the right answer is to extract everyone's best gear, archive the old .prospect file, and start a fresh world. The early game in ICARUS is some of the best content in the game and there's no shame in going back to it.

Linux note

ICARUS's dedicated server is a Windows-native build upstream. There are community Docker images that run it on Linux, and they mostly work, but if you want the path of least resistance pick a Windows plan. Our ICARUS getting started guide covers the initial setup, the server settings guide goes deeper on ServerSettings.ini, and if something's actually broken the troubleshooting guide is the first place to check before opening a ticket.

The most common prospect ticket we get, by some distance, is the one I opened with: someone changed LoadProspect, didn't take a backup, and panicked. If you take nothing else from this guide, take that one habit. Backup, then edit. Everything else is recoverable.