Somebody in your Discord has already asked whether it's worth starting a fresh PvP world now or holding off until Warfare 3 lands, and if you're anything like me you didn't have a good answer: the only hard information out there is a name on a roadmap with two months attached to it.
So here's the honest version. What Keen have actually confirmed about Warfare 3, what the previous Warfare updates did to dedicated servers when they landed, and what I'd be doing between now and then if I were running one.
What Keen have said, and where they said it
Three official sources, all pointing the same way.
Marek Rosa's dev diary on 18 June 2026 was the first place a version number showed up: "we are already planning Space Engineers major update 211: Warfare 3 for Q4 2026". So Warfare 3 is update 211, the one after 1.210 "Prosperity".
The Prosperity release post on 27 July narrowed that. Keen's wording, and it's worth reading closely: "Our next Space Engineers update, Warfare 3, is shaping up to be a big one! We aim to deliver it to you in November/December 2026. Expect new weapon types, new combat systems, and changes designed to make battles, PvP, and ship-to-ship engagements more dynamic. This time, your weapons may not be aimed only at other players... There are new threats on the horizon."
And the official roadmap now carries Warfare 3 as its upcoming entry, dated November/December 2026, described as "our next edition of fan-favorite Warfare Updates". Three sources. Same window.
That's genuinely all of it: no date, no block list, no changelog, no public test branch. If you see an article naming a specific day in November, somebody has guessed and then written it down confidently, which is not the same thing as news.
The one line I keep coming back to is "your weapons may not be aimed only at other players". My read is NPC combat, and the run-up supports it: Keen spent June on a post called Factorum Secrets and August on the Factorum Drone Depot, so the recurring antagonist is plainly being set up for something. But that's a reading. It isn't a fact, and I'd rather say so than dress it up.
What Warfare 1 and Warfare 2 actually did to servers
Here's where the history earns its keep. We've got two precedents, and they're nothing like each other.
Warfare 1: Field Engineer arrived on 22 April 2021 as update 198. For anyone running a server, its footprint was mostly new world settings: friendly fire as a multiplayer option, a character speed multiplier, a recoil toggle, an environment damage multiplier, plus team balancer and match administration components aimed at PvP scenarios. New keys in the session settings, in other words, rather than new machinery.
That's quieter than it sounds and also sneakier, because of how Space Engineers treats a setting it can't find. When a key is missing from the world file, the documented default applies. Your existing world doesn't get asked what it wants: it just inherits whatever Keen decided, silently, and you find out three weeks later when somebody notices friendly fire has been on the whole time.
Warfare 2: Broadside landed on 3 February 2022 as update 200, and that one was a proper event. The block list alone: railgun in both grid sizes, large-grid artillery and an artillery turret, a small-grid assault cannon, assault cannon turrets in both sizes, autocannon and autocannon turret. Underneath all that sat a Mod API section long enough to be its own article: turret interfaces, projectile and missile APIs, damage events, grid groups, weapon group UI compatibility, on and on.
That combination is the one to hold onto. When Keen rework the weapons and the mod-facing API in the same release, weapon mods are what breaks, and they break the day it ships rather than politely a week later.
Warfare Evolution in August 2023 was the third update to wear the name and much the lightest of them: an experimental PvP scenario, AI and combat tuning, performance work, and the first release to go out on Steam, Xbox and PlayStation together. Worth knowing mostly because it means "Warfare 3" is really the fourth Warfare-branded update, and the naming has never tracked neatly against the version numbers either.
So: one precedent where the risk was settings drifting under you, and one where it was your mod list falling over. Warfare 3 is being pitched as new weapons plus new combat systems. That's Warfare 2's shape, not Warfare 1's.
What that means on a server here
The structural thing about this game, and the reason a good chunk of our Space Engineers tickets exist, is that the settings people want to change don't live where they expect.
The dedicated server config is generated from a template and rewritten automatically, so it isn't the file to fight with. Your world's own Sandbox_config.sbc, sitting in WORLD\Saves\<yourworld>\, is what a running server actually obeys once the world exists, and it isn't panel-managed, which is precisely why edits there survive. Our server configuration guide covers which file wins and when.
So when Warfare 3 adds combat settings, that's where they'll surface. Service Settings in the LOW.MS Control Panel exposes a deliberately short list for Space Engineers (world name and folder, trash removal, the mod fields, Torch plugins, console compatibility, network type), and combat options have never been on it. Don't go hunting for a toggle that isn't there. I'd expect a repeat of what happened with Prosperity's "Prevent Sending Grids to Distant Locations", which was a real new dedicated server option that arrived with no panel field behind it at all. When that happens, open a ticket and we'll set it for you.
Two other bits of housekeeping I'd get straight before update day, not during it.
Admins first. The <Administrators> block in the generated config comes back empty whenever that file gets regenerated, so if you added Steam IDs by hand at some point and they've quietly disappeared since: yes, that's the explanation, and no, you didn't imagine it. A combat update is exactly when you'll want spectator and creative tools working. Check yours now, and raise a ticket if they've gone.
Then your mod list. Go through it while there's no pressure on and work out which of your weapon and turret mods are actually still maintained, because Warfare 2's precedent says those are the ones with a rebuild coming. A mod whose author last touched it in 2023 is a mod to plan around rather than hope for. The mods and Torch guide goes through how a mod list actually attaches to a world, which is the bit people get wrong under time pressure, and time pressure is exactly what update day is.
The rest of the prep, briefly
- Take a backup you'd genuinely be willing to roll back to. Cloud Backup in the panel is thirty seconds, and if you want a copy off the machine entirely, pull
WORLD\Saves\over SFTP on port 8822. - Don't rebuild your fleet around an unmaintained mod in October: that's a self-inflicted wound with a date on it.
- Torch itself will probably be fine and fast: its Prosperity support merged 83 minutes after that update went live. Your third-party plugins are the lag, and after a weapons-and-API release they'll lag harder than usual.
- Expect one very slow first boot while Workshop content re-downloads. Let it finish. Stopping it halfway is how a save gets hurt.
- Keen keep old version branches on Steam, so a rollback isn't impossible if something goes badly wrong. Ask us rather than experimenting with it on a live world.
When the update does land, the mechanics of updating are the same as every other time and we've written them up already: updating your server and fixing version mismatch was written for 1.210 but the process doesn't change. If a world refuses to come up afterwards, it's nearly always a mod rather than Keen's build, and sector could not be loaded covers the ugly end of that.
On the date itself
I'd treat November/December as a real window rather than a hopeful one. Keen's recent form is decent: that same June dev diary called Prosperity for July/August and it shipped on 27 July, and Economy 2 was announced for May and landed on the 4th. The Warfare 3 window has been narrowed from Q4 rather than pushed back, which is the direction you want to see these things move.
Still a two-month window though, not a date. I wouldn't book a community launch event against it, and when Keen name a day we'll update this and the KBs with it.
If you're running Space Engineers with us and you'd rather we just handled the update when it comes, say so in a ticket and we'll flag your service. And if you're still deciding where to put a world, the Space Engineers hosting page is over here, and the full setup guide walks through the first boot, which is still the step that catches most people.