Your players are getting bounced at the connect screen and the message mentions a version mismatch. Nothing on your server changed. That's the giveaway: Space Engineers update 1.210 "Prosperity" went live on Monday 27 July 2026 at 17:00 UTC, Steam has already pushed the new build to everyone's client, and your dedicated server is still sitting on 1.209 until somebody tells it otherwise.
If you're reading this the morning after with a pile of complaints, this is the article for you. The fix is short. The rest is the stuff worth knowing before you press the button.
The update itself is free
Worth clearing up first, because we get asked every single time Keen ship something with a store page attached.
Everything in 1.210 is free. Keen's own wording is "If you own Space Engineers, everything below is yours - no extra purchase needed." There is a separate paid Prosperity Pack, which is over 50 cosmetic and decorative blocks that, again in Keen's words, "don't affect gameplay balance". Your server does not need the Pack. It doesn't need anyone on the server to own the Pack. It's a cosmetic purchase for individual players and it has nothing to do with whether your dedicated server runs.
The full changelog is on Keen's support portal: Update 1.210 Prosperity. If you saw the Steam announcement instead, its "Full Blog Post" link is broken and drops you on the May Economy 2 blog, so use the support portal link.
Why your players can't connect
Two error strings, depending on how the player tried to join. Both mean the same thing.
Server has different version of the game
The server host denied access because of version mismatch. Please, update to most recent versions.
Steam updates clients automatically. It does not update your dedicated server automatically. So the moment Keen flip the switch, every player who launches the game gets the new build and every server that hasn't been updated is now on the wrong side of a version check. There's no partial compatibility here and no grace period, it's a hard refusal.
Back up before you update, not after
I'd take a backup first, every time, and it takes about thirty seconds.
Open your service in the LOW.MS Control Panel and run a Cloud Backup. That's your rollback point if the world doesn't come up cleanly afterwards. Backup Manager does the same job locally if you'd rather keep the copy on the machine.
If you want a copy off the box entirely, pull the Saves\ folder over SFTP on port 8822.
No save-format change has been announced for 1.210. That isn't the same thing as a promise that nothing will go wrong, and the cost of being wrong without a backup is your world. Take the backup.
Updating the server
- Stop the service.
- Run Steam Update from the service sidebar.
- Start it again.
Give it a few minutes. SteamCMD has a real download to pull for a content update this size, and the first start after it will be slower than usual. Watch Log Viewer or Web Console while it comes up rather than sitting on the service list refreshing.
One standing rule, and it matters more during an update than at any other time: don't launch the dedicated server executable or Torch by hand over RDP while the panel also controls the service. You get two processes fighting over the same ports, and if you do it mid-update you can interrupt SteamCMD and leave the install half-written. Drive it from the panel.
Torch servers
Torch was quick this time. Torch PR #645 merged at 18:40 UTC on 27 July, 83 minutes after the update went live, and it carries the new Prosperity grid-storage settings. So if you've been holding off on updating because you expected Torch to lag by a week, you don't need to wait.
Download Torch from torchapi.com. This is the one people get wrong: Torch's GitHub releases page still shows 1.3.1 from December 2023 as the newest release and looks thoroughly abandoned. It isn't. GitHub just stopped being where builds get published. Always pull from torchapi.com.
Your third-party plugins are a different matter. Each one is maintained by its own author on its own schedule, and a plugin that touches grids, contracts or the economy has a decent chance of needing a rebuild against 1.210. Torch being ready doesn't mean your plugin list is.
Mods
Expect one slow start. Workshop content re-downloads after a game update, so the first boot on 1.210 will sit there for a while pulling mods before the world loads. That's normal and it happens once.
The definition files that changed in this update are the ones to watch:
EntityComponents.sbc
ContractTypes.sbc
EntityContainers.sbc
Any mod that overrides or extends those is where breakage will show up. Contract mods, cargo and inventory mods, and anything doing clever things with block components are the usual suspects.
Here's the thing to hold onto if your world won't load after updating: it's almost always a mod, not the update. Keen's build works. A mod that was written against last week's definitions might not. That distinction saves you a lot of time, because it tells you where to look.
The new server-side setting
1.210 adds a dedicated server option, listed in the changelog as:
Dedicated Server Option: Prevent Sending Grids to Distant Locations
It does what the name says, and it's aimed at the grid-launching behaviour that turns into cleanup work for admins. You'll find it with the rest of the world options in Service Settings or the world config through Configuration Files, depending on how your service is set up.
Torch admins get finer control. The keys added in PR #645 are:
GridStorageMinutesPerKm
GridStorageCombatCooldown
GridStorageMaxDistance
Leave them on defaults until you know you need them. If you're already running an economy-heavy or PvP server where grids get flung across the map, that's where you'd start tuning.
What's actually in it
Briefly, because this is a KB and not a patch-notes rehash. Prosperity is a thematic follow-up to Economy 2: a new Factorum encounter, new Prototech, tracking for missing ships, and improvements to the Projector, Contracts, the Services Terminal and the economy systems generally. Community previews suggest new blocks turning up in worlds that already exist, so don't be surprised if your players start finding things without a new save.
If it breaks
Players still see "Server has different version of the game". The server is still on 1.209. Run Steam Update again and check the log to confirm it actually completed. This is by far the most common report we get after any Keen update, and it's almost never anything more complicated than the update not having run.
The world won't load. Disable every mod, start the server, confirm it comes up on vanilla. Then add mods back in batches and narrow it down. Start with anything definition-heavy, because those three .sbc files are the risk set.
Torch won't start, or a plugin crashes it. Update Torch from torchapi.com first. If it still falls over, disable your third-party plugins, start clean, then re-enable one at a time until you find the one that's unhappy.
Very slow first start. That's the Workshop re-download. Let it finish. If the second and third starts are also slow, then something else is going on and it's worth a ticket.
A VRage.Library crash on start. That's the signature of an interrupted update, usually because the service got restarted or launched manually while SteamCMD was still working. Don't sit there restart-looping it. Re-run Steam Update, or validate the files, and let it finish properly this time.
"Sector could not be loaded". Restore your pre-update backup. One trap worth flagging: moving the bad save out of the Saves\ folder is what you need to do, renaming it in place doesn't work because the server picks up whatever world is sitting there regardless of the name. Full walkthrough here: Space Engineers: "Sector Could Not Be Loaded" and How to Recover Your World. If you're bringing a world in from elsewhere, Space Engineers Save Location & How to Upload Your World covers that side.
Keen have said the next update is Warfare 3, aimed at November or December 2026, so there's a decent run before you need to do this again.
If you've updated, cleared your mods, and it still won't come up, open a ticket with the service name and roughly when it started failing. We'll pull the logs and the backup history from our side. If you're weighing up a move, our Space Engineers server hosting page has the details.