StarRupture is still in Early Access, and the dedicated server tools are still officially flagged experimental, so it's a given that you'll hit the occasional weird thing. Most of the "weird things" we see on LOW.MS support tickets fall into a fairly small number of buckets, and the fixes are usually quick once you know what you're looking at. This guide collects the common ones.
For the specific LogRemoteControl error there's a dedicated write-up in Fixing StarRupture server errors — that's a good companion to this page.
"Players can't connect"
Fast checklist:
- Is the server actually Running in the LOW.MS Control Panel? Green status, not red or stopped. If it crashed, restart it and wait 60–90 seconds.
- Is the world actually loaded? A running server without a loaded save still looks "online" but nobody can actually play on it. An admin needs to have done Manage Server → New/Load Game → Start Game at least once since the last boot, or the server needs
DSSettings.txtset up to auto-load a save. - Are players using the Join password, not the Management password? This one catches a lot of people — they're two different things.
- Are the game and server on the same version? If the server just updated, Steam needs to update the clients too.
If the answer to all four is yes and it still doesn't work, have a look at Required ports & firewall. On LOW.MS you don't normally need to touch ports at all — the relevant UDP ports are open on the public IP out of the box — but it's worth a check.
"Players get randomly disconnected during a session"
In order of likelihood:
- RAM exhaustion. Watch the RAM gauge in your control panel during a session. If you're sitting at 90%+ consistently, bump your allocation. Crashes and disconnects follow RAM pressure very reliably on StarRupture.
- Version mismatch after a silent Steam update. Restart the server, have players restart Steam.
- Player-side network. Wi-Fi + VPN + UDP game traffic is a cursed combination. If it's always the same one player dropping, get them to try a wired connection with VPN off.
Server crashes on startup
Almost always a broken DSSettings.txt. It's JSON, so a missing comma or stray quote will take the whole file out. Open the file and compare it against this known-good example:
{
"SessionName": "MyServer",
"SaveGameInterval": "300",
"StartNewGame": "false",
"LoadSavedGame": "true",
"SaveGameName": "AutoSave0.sav"
}
If the JSON is fine and it still won't start, the next thing to try is loading a different autosave by changing SaveGameName to AutoSave1.sav. That covers the "latest save got corrupted" case.
Still stuck? Check Log Viewer in the control panel for the actual error line — that's almost always the fastest way to identify what's going wrong. Open a ticket from control.low.ms if you want us to look.
Server crashes mid-session
Two common causes in our experience:
Out of memory. Same story as the disconnect case. Check the RAM graph around the time of the crash. If it spiked to your ceiling, upgrade.
Complex conveyor setups. The StarRupture conveyor system is famously unstable in Early Access, especially with multi-line / parallel conveyor configurations. If crashes line up with activity in a specific factory area, that's your suspect. Simpler single-lane layouts are much more reliable until the dev team gets the multi-line bugs sorted.
For automatic recovery from crashes, set up a Scheduled Task in the control panel to restart the server on a fixed interval (e.g. nightly at 4 AM). It's a one-time setup and it quietly handles 90% of out-of-hours crash situations.
Lag and stuttering during gameplay
The big three, in order of how often they're the real culprit:
- RAM pressure. Same again. Upgrade if you're sitting near the ceiling.
- Single-thread CPU. StarRupture's simulation is overwhelmingly single-thread. If you've got a base with huge conveyor loops and mob spawns, the optional Premium CPU upgrade (Ryzen 7950X/9950X) is a real and noticeable improvement.
- Over-frequent autosaves. If you set
SaveGameIntervalto something like"60", you'll get micro-lag every minute. Bump it to at least"300".
"My world is gone after a restart"
In almost every case this is StartNewGame being left on "true" in DSSettings.txt. After the first run, it must be false. The flow is in Managing saves and DSSettings.txt config.
If the file is correct and the save still isn't loading, check that SaveGameName matches a file that actually exists under /StarRupture/Saved/SaveGames/<SessionName>/. A typo in the filename is the next most common cause.
And if the save really is gone, LOW.MS runs automated cloud backups — open a support ticket and we'll look for a restore point.
Known Early Access bugs (not things you can fix server-side)
Some things aren't server misconfiguration, they're game bugs the developers are actively working on. A handful that show up a lot in Early Access:
- Conveyor belt issues — rails vanishing, multi-line systems breaking, items getting stuck on junctions. Workaround is to keep conveyor layouts simple and use single lanes where you can.
- "Location is not stable" when building — triggered by terrain stability calculations on even mildly uneven ground. Placing a foundation first and then building on top of the foundation is the usual workaround.
- Cave access permanently blocked after a fire wave — known bug, avoid building critical infrastructure inside caves if you can help it.
- Secondary weapons lost on death — there's an active bug where secondary slots don't drop properly on the body. Keep valuables at base.
- Client-side save state drift in co-op — players occasionally saw inventory or progress not save cleanly between sessions. Note that "SaveSync" in the StarRupture docs refers to a separate peer-to-peer host-migration tool, not a dedicated-server feature — on a dedicated server your canonical save is always the one on the server, under
/StarRupture/Saved/SaveGames/<SessionName>/.
Update 1 (released 9 April 2026) fixes several of these in the 0.2.0 patch notes, including a co-op join crash, save states not showing correctly in 4-player sessions, and crashes building certain endgame structures. The conveyor multi-line and "Location is not stable" problems were not specifically called out in the notes, so treat those as still live until further patches land. Worth checking the StarRupture Steam news feed for the latest on any of them.
Getting further help
- Specific server errors → Fixing StarRupture server errors
- Ports / firewall → Required ports and firewall
- Saves → Managing StarRupture server saves
- Passwords → Reset / change StarRupture passwords
- Anything else → open a ticket from control.low.ms with the error message from Log Viewer and we'll have a look.