Windrose Config Changes Not Saving? Here's Why

So you edited ServerDescription.json – changed the server name, tweaked the player cap, maybe enabled password protection – saved the file, restarted the server, and now your changes are gone. The file's back to what it was before. I've had this come in as a support ticket enough times that it's worth its own article.

The good news: it's not a bug, and your server isn't broken. The bad news: it's a slightly annoying design choice you have to work around.

Windrose Rewrites Its Config Files

Here's what's actually happening. Windrose treats ServerDescription.json and WorldDescription.json as authoritative in-memory state. The game loads these files at startup, holds their contents in memory, and then writes them back out on graceful shutdown. Any edits you make on disk while the server is running get overwritten the moment the server stops.

So if you:

1. Edit ServerDescription.json while the server is running
2. Save the file
3. Stop the server cleanly

…the file's now back to what the server had in memory, minus your edits. Same thing for WorldDescription.json. Your changes didn't stick because the server never knew about them.

This is how a lot of survival games handle live state. It's not unique to Windrose. What is unique is that there's no in-game UI to change these settings while the server is running, so file editing is the only option – which means working around this quirk is a necessary skill.

The Fix: Stop Before You Edit

The correct sequence is always:

1. Stop the server from the LOW.MS Control Panel (or whatever panel you're using).
2. Wait for it to fully shut down. Windrose writes its final state on shutdown, and you don't want to interrupt that.
3. Edit ServerDescription.json or WorldDescription.json.
4. Save the file.
5. Start the server.

That's it. The server boots with your new values and uses them going forward.

If you want to convince yourself it's working, change ServerName to something obvious (like "Test Server 123"), save, start, and check the Web Console output – you'll see the new name in the startup log.

Configuration Files Form Editor

The control panel exposes a Configuration Files section in the sidebar that gives you a form-based editor for common config values. This is nicer than editing raw JSON, and it handles a lot of the syntax concerns for you.

But here's the thing: Configuration Files still writes to the same underlying JSON files. The same stop-before-editing rule applies. The form editor doesn't magically bypass Windrose's shutdown-rewrite behaviour – it's just a nicer way to produce the file contents.

So even when you use Configuration Files: stop the server first, make your changes, save, start.

What About WorldDescription.json?

Same rule, with one extra wrinkle. Windrose has world presets (Easy, Medium, Hard, Captain's Choice). If you're on one of the named presets and you manually tweak any WorldSettings parameter, the game automatically converts your preset to Custom (labelled Captain's Choice in the UI). This is by design, not a bug. You can't run "Medium with one tweak" – it becomes Captain's Choice the moment anything in the settings block diverges from the preset default.

That's a separate issue from the shutdown rewrite, but it sometimes gets conflated with it. If your preset changed from Medium to Captain's Choice after you edited something, that's the game's preset-collision logic, not the config-rewrite one.

WorldIslandId Must Match

While we're on the subject of config files that need to line up: the WorldIslandId field in ServerDescription.json must match the IslandId inside your active WorldDescription.json. If you edit one without the other (or upload a save from elsewhere), the server won't load the world. Worth mentioning because sometimes "my config changes aren't working" is actually "I set the wrong IslandId." The configuration guide goes deeper on that.

Quick Sanity Check

If you're sure you stopped the server, edited the file, saved, and started, and your changes still aren't sticking, a few things to check:

• Did the server actually stop cleanly? If the process crashed or was force-killed, it might not have written its final state, and on next start it could re-read stale values from somewhere.
• Did you edit the right file? Some guides mention a cached copy somewhere; the one that matters is the JSON directly in R5/.
• Did the file actually save? Sounds silly but I've seen it – Configuration Files occasionally doesn't save if you close the tab without hitting the save button.

Honestly, 95% of the time it's just the stop-first thing. Get that habit down and this problem goes away. For broader Windrose server issues, our general troubleshooting guide covers the rest of the landscape.