Conan Exiles Server Troubleshooting Guide

Running into something weird on your Conan Exiles server? This is the catch-all troubleshooting guide — it's the stuff that comes up most often in tickets, grouped by symptom. If you're brand new, the Getting Started and Server Settings guides are a better starting point. If nothing here fixes your issue, skip to the bottom and open a ticket from the LOW.MS Control Panel — we're around 24/7.

Can't connect to the server

This is the number one ticket we get, and 95% of the time it's one of a handful of things. Work through them in order.

1. Is the server actually running? Log into the LOW.MS Control Panel, open your Conan server, and check the status at the top. If it's stopped, use the START button. If it's already running but you've just restarted it, give it a minute — Conan takes a little while to finish loading the world and opening its ports, especially on modded servers.

2. Are you using the right IP and port? Conan's default game port is 7777, query port 7778, RCON 7779. In the in-game Direct Connect dialog you want the game port, so your.server.ip:7777. A single typo will keep you out, and we get tickets every week where the fix is literally "you had 7778".

3. Is the server in the in-game browser yet? Freshly started servers don't always show up immediately — the Steam master server list has its own schedule and it might take a few minutes to catch up. Use Direct Connect in the meantime, or add the server to your Steam favourites via View → Servers → Favorites and it'll show up reliably there.

4. Server name weirdness Really long server names, or names with a lot of special characters, will sometimes get dropped from the browser entirely. If nobody can find your server by name but Direct Connect works, shorten the name and restart.

5. Have you actually waited? After a restart Conan needs a bit of time to load the save, generate the NPC population, and then start accepting connections. If you try to connect the instant the panel says "running" you'll get a timeout that has nothing to do with your actual setup. Give it a moment.

"Pending Connection Failure"

This one is annoying because the error message is basically useless — it just means your client got as far as the handshake and then bounced. Any of these can cause it:

• Mod version mismatch. Most common by far. The server updated its mods and your client hasn't pulled the new versions yet, or vice versa. Restart Steam, let it re-sync, try again.
• Client/server game version drift. If Conan pushed an update, your client might already be on it while the server hasn't restarted to pick it up (or the other way around). Run a Steam Update from the panel.
• Full server. Obvious, but worth checking.
• BattlEye not installed properly on the client. See the BattlEye section below.

Server won't start / keeps crashing

First stop: open Log Viewer in the panel sidebar and read the last hundred or so lines. Conan is actually pretty decent at logging why it died, and the answer is almost always sat there in plain English.

Common causes:

• A broken mod. If it started crashing the moment you added a mod, that's your culprit. Remove the last mod you added via Mod Manager and try again.
• A Conan update you haven't pulled yet. Use Steam Update in the sidebar to force a fresh update, then restart.
• A config file you've edited by hand and broken. If you've been in Configuration Files editing ServerSettings.ini (located at ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ (or LinuxServer/ if you're on a Linux host — same files, different parent folder)), revert your last change and see if it boots.
• Database gone bad. Rare, but it happens — usually after an unclean shutdown. Restore yesterday's save via Cloud Restore or Backup Manager and you'll be back in business.

If the Log Viewer output is gibberish to you, grab the last 50 lines, paste them into a ticket, and we'll take a look.

Mods are being a nightmare

Mods are the single biggest source of Conan server pain. We see a lot of this, and it's almost always one of three things.

Mods aren't loading

• Open Mod Manager in the panel. Every mod you want loaded needs to be in the list, and the list is written out to modlist.txt for the server to read on boot.
• After you've added or changed mods, restart the server. The server only reads the mod list at startup — live edits won't do anything.
• Big mods can be several hundred megabytes. If you just added one, give the server a minute to pull it from the Workshop before assuming it's broken. The Log Viewer will show you the download progress.

"Mod mismatch" when clients join

Every client has to have the exact same mods, in the exact same order, at the same versions as the server. The easiest way to keep everyone in sync is to bundle your mods as a Steam Workshop Collection and hand the collection link out — clients can subscribe to the whole thing in one click.

If one specific player is stuck in a mismatch loop while everyone else is fine, get them to unsubscribe from everything, restart Steam, and re-subscribe from your collection link. Nine times out of ten that clears it.

Mods cause crashes

If you've just added a new mod and the server's now crashing, it's that mod. Remove it, restart, done.

If you've got a bigger stack and you're not sure which one is at fault, disable mods in batches — halve the list, see if it boots, then halve the half that broke it. Bisecting is faster than pulling them out one at a time, especially with ten or more mods.

A small warning: there is no "official" load order rule for Conan mods. You'll see forum posts swearing by this order or that order — ignore them unless the specific mod's own Workshop page tells you it needs to load before or after something else. Most of the time the mod authors have already sorted dependencies out for you and reordering your list will make things worse, not better.

Performance issues — lag, rubber-banding, low TPS

Open Current Activity & Stats in the panel and have a look at RAM and CPU usage first. If the box is pinned, you've found your answer: either something is eating resources it shouldn't be (usually a mod) or you've outgrown your plan and a bigger server would help.

Assuming resources look okay, the usual suspects for Conan lag, roughly in order of how often they're the cause:

1. Building piece counts. Huge bases with thousands of placed pieces are the single biggest cause of Conan server lag. Every piece is tracked and synced. One player's mountain fortress can tank the entire server for everyone.
2. Abandoned bases. Turn on building decay in ServerSettings.ini and let the game clean up after players who've left. It makes a real difference over the lifetime of a server.
3. Purges. Active purges spawn a pile of NPCs and run a lot of pathfinding. TPS will dip during a purge and that's mostly normal — just don't run them during peak hours if you can help it.
4. Mods that add NPCs or building pieces. AI overhauls and "more buildables" mods are lovely but expensive. If you've installed one and performance fell off a cliff, you've found your culprit.
5. Player count near the cap. Conan's hard cap is 70, but every server has a sweet spot well below that where things start to get tight. If you're running near your ceiling and it feels bad, it probably is.

The free first-line fix for any lag complaint: we usually recommend a daily restart anyway. Conan accumulates memory over time and a fresh start works wonders. Use Scheduled Tasks in the panel to set it up and forget about it.

BattlEye issues

BattlEye is Conan's anti-cheat and it has a reputation. Here's what you can actually do.

You want to turn BattlEye off (private server)

On LOW.MS this is self-serve — you don't need a ticket. Open Commandline Manager in the panel, find the BattlEye launch flag in your command line, toggle it off, save, and restart the server. Everyone can connect without BattlEye's client-side install being in the way. Nice for small private groups where you know everyone.

If you want it back on later, same place, toggle it back.

BattlEye is failing on the client

This is a client-side problem and there's nothing the server can do about it directly. Get the affected player to:

• Restart Steam and Conan fully.
• Right-click Conan in Steam → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files. This reinstalls BattlEye on the client if it's gone missing.
• Run Steam as administrator (yes, really — it sometimes matters for BattlEye).
• Temporarily disable anything that injects an overlay — Discord, MSI Afterburner, RivaTuner, the lot. BattlEye is twitchy about overlays and will occasionally refuse to start if one of them misbehaves.

BattlEye is broken on the server itself

If the server logs say BattlEye failed to load on the server side, raise a ticket and we'll reinstall it for you. This isn't something you need to fight with by hand.

Steam Update and game version issues

When Funcom pushes a patch, your server needs to pull it before anyone on the new client version can join. Open Steam Update in the panel sidebar and run it — the server will stop, update, and start again on its own. Then restart once more for good measure.

A couple of gotchas:

• Mods often break the moment the base game updates. Give it a day and most popular mods will have caught up. Check each mod's Workshop page if you're in a hurry.
• If you've edited config files recently, double-check them after a big update — Funcom occasionally changes config keys or adds new sections and your old file can get half-overwritten. If in doubt, the defaults live in ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ (or LinuxServer/ if you're on a Linux host — same files, different parent folder) and you can always restore from Cloud Restore.

Backups, lost progress, "my world reset"

Before you panic: we keep automatic cloud backups of your server data. If something has gone badly wrong, you almost certainly haven't lost everything.

To restore a backup:

1. Stop the server from the panel overview (the STOP button at the top).
2. Open Cloud Restore (or Backup Manager) in the sidebar.
3. Pick the most recent backup that was taken before the thing went wrong.
4. Confirm the restore.
5. Start the server again.

A few specific situations worth mentioning:

• "A player lost their inventory." Usually this is either a crash that happened between auto-saves (anything they picked up in that window is gone — it's how Conan works), or a mod got removed and took its custom items with it. Removing a mod always deletes any items it added from every inventory. That's expected, not a bug.
• "A player lost their character entirely." Much rarer. This is usually a failed character transfer between servers. If there's no backup from before the transfer attempt, the character can't be recovered — Funcom's system doesn't leave us anywhere to pull it back from.
• "The whole world has reset." Almost always means the server booted with a broken save and started fresh. Stop it immediately (don't let it keep writing over the new empty save!) and restore from Cloud Restore. The faster you catch this the more you'll keep.

One habit worth forming: after any config change you're proud of, grab a copy of ServerSettings.ini from File Manager and stash it somewhere local. It takes ten seconds and saves hours if an update ever scrambles your settings.

If none of this helps

We'd rather hear from you sooner than later — there's no prize for bouncing off a problem for two hours before opening a ticket. Raise one from the panel and include:

• What you were doing when it broke.
• What the Log Viewer says (last 30-50 lines is plenty).
• Any mods you've got installed, and whether you recently added or changed one.
• Whether it's affecting everyone or just one specific player.

With that in hand we can usually get you back up and running pretty quickly. If it turns out to be something on our side — a node hiccup, a network blip, a hardware issue — we'll sort it out and let you know what happened.