This is the long-form reference for Conan Exiles server configuration on a LOW.MS box — what the settings do, which ones actually matter, and how to change them without breaking your server. If you just want a quick opinionated setting profile, the best Conan Exiles server settings blog has those. If you haven't picked a plan yet, current specs are on the Conan Exiles hosting page.
Where the settings live
Conan Exiles keeps almost everything you care about in a single file:
ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ServerSettings.ini
There are a handful of other ini files in the same folder (Engine.ini, Game.ini) but for 99% of what you'll want to tweak, ServerSettings.ini is the only one you need to touch.
A heads-up on that path: we currently run Conan Exiles on Windows hosts, so it's WindowsServer/. We're planning to move to Linux at some point — if you've been migrated, the same file lives under ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/ instead. Same filenames, same contents, just a different parent folder. Everything else in this guide applies identically.
Two ways to edit it from the LOW.MS Control Panel:
- Configuration Files — structured editor, groups settings into categories, the safe option if you don't want to fat-finger a typo into a raw ini.
- File Manager — raw access to the file. Useful when you want to paste a whole preset in one go, or when you're diffing against a backup.
I'd recommend stopping the server before you save changes. Conan writes the ini back out on shutdown, and if your edit lands in the same second as a save it can get clobbered. Stop, edit, save, start — takes ten seconds and avoids a lot of head-scratching.
One thing to flag before we dive in: Conan Exiles has a lot of settings, and Funcom has changed and renamed a fair number of them over the years. The keys below are the ones I actually trust on current builds. If you see an older guide referencing something I haven't listed here, treat it with suspicion rather than pasting it in blind.
The basics
The first block you'll want to sort out. These don't need much explanation.
[ServerSettings]
ServerName=My Conan Server
ServerPassword=
AdminPassword=PickSomethingLong
MaxPlayers=40
ServerName— what shows up in the browser. Make it distinctive, especially if you're running in a crowded region.ServerPassword— leave blank for a public server, fill it in for a private one.AdminPassword— the one you'll type into the in-game admin UI to unlock admin mode. Treat it like an actual password, notadmin123.MaxPlayers— your slot count. If you set this higher than what you paid for it just gets capped to the plan limit, so there's no point.
Harvesting and gathering
This is the first knob most server owners reach for. It controls how much stuff you get from each swing of the pick.
HarvestAmountMultiplier=1.0
ItemSpoilRateScale=1.0
ResourceRespawnSpeedMultiplier=1.0
HarvestAmountMultiplier— flat multiplier on everything you gather. 1.0 is vanilla. On a casual PvE server I'd push this to somewhere between 2.0 and 3.0 so people aren't farming stone for half the weekend. On a competitive PvP server I'd keep it closer to 1.0-1.5, because cheap resources means cheap raid supplies.ItemSpoilRateScale— how fast perishables rot. Lower number means slower rot. Dropping to 0.5 is a popular quality-of-life change that most players never notice but appreciate when their preserved fish don't vanish overnight.ResourceRespawnSpeedMultiplier— how quickly nodes in the world come back. Most folks leave this alone; it only really matters on small, heavily-farmed maps.
Experience and crafting
PlayerXPRateMultiplier=1.0
PlayerXPKillMultiplier=1.0
PlayerXPHarvestMultiplier=1.0
CraftingCostMultiplier=1.0
PlayerXPRateMultiplier is the overall XP dial — it scales everything. The Kill and Harvest multipliers are sub-dials on top of that, so you can, for instance, boost harvesting XP without turning combat into a drip-feed. If you want a fast catch-up server, 3x overall is plenty; more than that and people hit level cap in a single evening and lose interest.
CraftingCostMultiplier does exactly what it sounds like. Below 1.0 means crafts consume fewer resources. I'd avoid going below 0.5 — anything lower starts making the economy feel weightless.
PvP, damage and raid windows
PVPEnabled=True
PlayerDamageMultiplier=1.0
PlayerDamageTakenMultiplier=1.0
NPCDamageMultiplier=1.0
NPCDamageTakenMultiplier=1.0
BuildingDamageMultiplier=1.0
RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime=True
PVPBuildingDamageTimeStart=18:00
PVPBuildingDamageTimeEnd=22:00
The four damage multipliers let you tune how squishy or tanky players and NPCs feel. PlayerDamageMultiplier is outgoing damage, PlayerDamageTakenMultiplier is incoming. Same pattern for NPCs. For most servers the defaults are fine — dial them only if you've got a specific reason, like an all-vanilla-gear challenge server.
The block of RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime / PVPBuildingDamageTimeStart / PVPBuildingDamageTimeEnd is how you build a PvE-Conflict style setup: PvP is on all the time, but buildings can only be damaged during the specified window. The example above only lets people raid between 6pm and 10pm server time. Crucial for communities where people have jobs and can't log on to defend at 3am.
Conan's three broad modes map to these settings like so:
- PvP —
PVPEnabled=True, no building damage restrictions. Raid anywhere, any time. - PvE —
PVPEnabled=False. No player combat, no raiding. - PvE-Conflict —
PVPEnabled=TruewithRestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime=Trueand a tight window.
BuildingDamageMultiplier scales how much damage structures take from all sources. Lower values mean raids take longer; higher values mean glass cannons. I generally leave this at 1.0 and tune raid difficulty via the window length instead.
The Purge
The Purge is Conan's signature bit — waves of NPCs show up and try to wreck your base. Getting it configured right is one of the bigger calls you'll make.
EnablePurge=True
PurgeLevel=4
ClanPurgeTrigger=42000
PVPBlitzServer=False
EnablePurge— master switch. Off and the whole system goes away.PurgeLevel— difficulty, on a 1-6 scale. Not 0-6. A lot of older guides get this wrong. 1 is gentle, 6 is brutal and will actively demolish most starter bases. For a mixed-skill community I'd sit at 3 or 4; 6 is really only for PvP servers where your base is already a fortress.ClanPurgeTrigger— how much clan activity builds up before a purge can fire. The default (42000) is roughly tuned for official server cadence. Lower it if you want more purges, raise it if you want them rarer.PVPBlitzServer— enables Funcom's blitz-style ruleset on PvP servers. Leave it off unless you know specifically that you want it.
There are a few more purge-related keys floating around for restricting when purges can fire (weekday vs weekend windows, minimum online players), but the key names have shifted between game updates and I'm not going to commit to spellings I can't verify this week. If you need that level of control, the in-game admin panel's Server Settings screen exposes the current keys directly and you can pull them from there.
Day/night cycle
DayCycleSpeedScale=1.0
DayTimeSpeedScale=1.0
NightTimeSpeedScale=1.0
DayCycleSpeedScale is the overall speed. DayTimeSpeedScale and NightTimeSpeedScale let you independently speed up day or night without touching the other. A very common tweak: leave DayTimeSpeedScale at 1.0 and crank NightTimeSpeedScale to 2.0 so the pitch-black Conan nights don't drag. I do this on every server I run and nobody's ever complained.
Thralls and building decay
ThrallConversionMultiplier=1.0
BuildingDecayEnabled=True
ThrallConversionMultiplier is one of those settings where the name is misleading. Lower is faster. It's a multiplier on the time it takes to break a thrall on the wheel. 0.5 means conversion takes half as long. If your community hates the grind, dropping this to 0.25 is a pretty popular move.
BuildingDecayEnabled is the one setting on this page I'd almost never turn off. If you leave it off, abandoned starter bases accumulate across the map forever, chewing up memory and filling the world with clutter. Leave it on. Active players with a single functioning bed or bedroll won't get hit by decay, so the only bases that go away are ones that genuinely nobody's logging in to maintain.
Preset: Casual PvE
For a group of friends who want to build and explore without grinding their lives away:
HarvestAmountMultiplier=2.5
PlayerXPRateMultiplier=2.0
CraftingCostMultiplier=0.75
ItemSpoilRateScale=0.5
ThrallConversionMultiplier=0.5
NightTimeSpeedScale=2.0
EnablePurge=True
PurgeLevel=3
BuildingDecayEnabled=True
PVPEnabled=False
Resources are generous, XP is boosted enough that people reach useful tiers in a weekend, crafting is a bit cheaper, spoilage is kinder, nights fly by, and the purge is present but not punishing. PvP is off so nobody's base is in danger from other players.
Preset: Competitive PvP
For servers where the whole point is raiding each other:
HarvestAmountMultiplier=1.5
PlayerXPRateMultiplier=1.5
CraftingCostMultiplier=1.0
PVPEnabled=True
RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime=True
PVPBuildingDamageTimeStart=18:00
PVPBuildingDamageTimeEnd=22:00
EnablePurge=True
PurgeLevel=5
BuildingDecayEnabled=True
NightTimeSpeedScale=1.5
Rates are only mildly boosted so raid prep still means something, raiding is locked to a 4-hour evening window so nobody's base gets flattened while they're at work, and the purge is cranked up because the player bases on a PvP server will be built to handle it anyway.
Preset: Roleplay
HarvestAmountMultiplier=2.0
PlayerXPRateMultiplier=1.5
CraftingCostMultiplier=0.75
DayCycleSpeedScale=0.5
NightTimeSpeedScale=1.0
EnablePurge=True
PurgeLevel=2
PVPEnabled=True
RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime=True
PVPBuildingDamageTimeStart=20:00
PVPBuildingDamageTimeEnd=22:00
BuildingDecayEnabled=True
Slower overall day cycle to let scenes breathe, a gentle purge so roleplay isn't constantly interrupted by combat, and a tiny PvP window so the setting can still have consequences when the story calls for them.
Admin commands and the in-game admin UI
Quick refresher — the full flow is in the Conan Exiles getting started guide, but in short: set AdminPassword in your ServerSettings.ini, join the server, open Settings → Server Settings, paste your admin password, and hit "Make Me Admin". You'll then see an admin panel you can use to spawn items, teleport, toggle god mode, change most server settings live, and kick or ban players.
Anything you change through the admin panel gets written back to ServerSettings.ini on the next save, so if you want to experiment with settings without manually editing the file, the in-game panel is actually a perfectly good way to do it.
If you're running into weird behaviour after changing settings — ini edits that aren't sticking, purges that won't fire, that sort of thing — the Conan Exiles troubleshooting guide is the next place to look.
Need help?
Open a ticket from the panel and we'll take a look. There's a lot of surface area in Conan Exiles configuration and most of the weird behaviour we see is down to two or three specific settings interacting in unexpected ways — if you describe what you're trying to achieve, support can usually point at the setting you actually want rather than the one you're currently poking at.