Vintage Story Server Settings – What Actually Matters

Vintage Story has a lot of server settings. Like, a lot. And the documentation tells you what each one does, but it doesn't really tell you which ones matter. I've tuned enough servers to have opinions about this, so here's the stuff that actually affects your players' experience – and the stuff you can safely ignore.

You can edit most of these through Configuration Files in the LOW.MS Control Panel, or through in-game commands with /serverconfig. The server configuration knowledgebase article has the full reference if you want it.

Settings That Actually Matter

MaxClients

This one's obvious but people still get it wrong. This is your maximum player count. Set it to what your server can actually handle, not what you wish it could handle.

The rough rule of thumb: each player needs about 300 MB of RAM on top of the ~1 GB base. So if you've got 4 GB allocated, you can comfortably handle around 8-10 players in vanilla. Mods reduce that headroom. I'd rather have a server that runs smoothly at 8 players than one that technically allows 20 but turns into a slideshow when 12 show up.

MaxChunkRadius

This controls how far around each player the server generates and ticks chunks. Higher values mean players see further, but the server has to process way more chunks.

Default is fine for small groups. If you're getting performance issues with 6+ players online, dropping this by a notch or two makes a surprisingly big difference. Each step down reduces the number of chunks the server processes per player exponentially – it's a square relationship, not linear.

On our servers we typically see the best balance at default or one step below for groups of 5-10 people.

PassTimeWhenEmpty

This is a big one and it depends entirely on what kind of server you're running. When set to true, the game world keeps ticking even when nobody's online. Crops grow, seasons change, temporal storms come and go.

For a community server where people play at different times, I'd almost always turn this on. It makes the world feel persistent and alive. Your farm is actually growing overnight. Seasons progress naturally.

For a small friend group that mostly plays together, you might want it off so you don't miss seasonal events or come back to find all your crops have died because winter came while everyone was at work.

AllowPvP

Default is on, and whether you keep it that way depends on your community. For friend groups, leaving it on is usually fine – maybe someone wants to duel. For public servers, turning it off avoids a lot of grief. New players who just spent 3 hours making their first bronze tools do not enjoy losing them to someone with iron gear who's been playing for a week.

SpawnCapPlayerScaling

Controls how the entity spawn cap scales with player count. This is one people overlook but it matters a lot. If you leave it at default and 10 players spread across the map, each area can feel pretty empty because the total entity cap is shared.

Bumping this up means more creatures spawn as more players are online. It keeps the world feeling populated. Just watch your server performance – more entities means more processing. It's a balance.

Performance Settings

If your server is lagging, these are the knobs to turn before throwing more RAM at it.

RandomBlockTicksPerChunk

This controls how many random block updates happen per chunk per tick. It affects crop growth speed, grass spreading, that sort of thing. Lower values mean less work for the server per tick.

Dropping this helps performance noticeably on busy servers. The tradeoff is slightly slower crop growth and natural block changes, but honestly most players won't notice a small reduction. Going from 20 to 15 is invisible to players but saves real CPU time when you've got hundreds of active chunks.

BlockTickChunkRange

How far from each player block ticks are processed. Similar to MaxChunkRadius but specifically for block updates. Reducing this means the server only processes block ticks close to players, which is usually what you want anyway – nobody cares if grass is spreading in a chunk that's 200 blocks away from the nearest player.

If I'm troubleshooting a laggy server, this and RandomBlockTicksPerChunk are the first two things I look at. Together they control the bulk of per-tick server work.

A Note on RAM vs CPU

People assume server lag means they need more RAM. Sometimes that's true, but Vintage Story servers are often CPU-bound, not RAM-bound. If your RAM usage is fine but you're getting tick lag, that's a CPU issue and the settings above are how you address it. Check Current Activity & Stats in the control panel to see what your actual resource usage looks like before upgrading.

World Setup Choices

These are set at world creation and can't be changed later, so they're worth thinking about upfront.

Play Styles

Vintage Story offers several preset play styles – Survival, Wilderness Survival, and some others. For most multiplayer servers, standard Survival is the way to go. Wilderness Survival removes the trader system, which can be interesting but also means players can't trade for things they're missing, which can be frustrating in multiplayer when not everyone is online at the same time.

World Size

You can set the world to be essentially infinite or bounded. For servers, I actually like setting a world border. It sounds restrictive, but it has real benefits – it keeps players closer together (which means more interaction), it makes resources feel more valuable because they're finite, and it reduces the chance of someone just walking 10,000 blocks away and generating tons of chunks your server has to remember forever.

Something like 50,000 x 50,000 blocks is enormous and will never feel cramped, but it prevents infinite world expansion eating your storage.

Map Height

The default world height is fine. Vintage Story's geology system with its layered rock types and ore distribution is designed around the default height. Changing it can make ore distribution weird and honestly I've never seen a good reason to mess with it.

Settings That Sound Important But You Probably Shouldn't Touch

TickTime

This is the server tick rate – how often the server processes a game tick. The default is tuned by Anego Studios and changing it causes more problems than it solves. Lower tick times mean the server tries to update more frequently, which sounds good but just causes tick lag when the server can't keep up. Higher tick times make the game feel sluggish and unresponsive.

Leave it alone. Seriously.

CorruptionProtection

I've seen people disable this thinking it's some kind of unnecessary overhead. It's not. It protects your world save from corruption during crashes. The performance cost is negligible and the downside of disabling it is potentially losing your entire world to a corrupted save. I've seen it happen. It's not fun to tell your players their world is gone.

WorldGenSettings (on an existing world)

Don't tweak worldgen settings after creation expecting them to apply everywhere. They only affect newly generated chunks, so you end up with weird discontinuities – biomes that cut off sharply, ore distributions that change at chunk boundaries. If you want different worldgen settings, make a new world.

My Recommended Starting Point

For a small server (2-6 friends), honestly? Use the defaults. Vintage Story's defaults are genuinely good. Turn on PassTimeWhenEmpty if you want persistent time, set your MaxClients, and play.

For a medium server (7-15 players), start paying attention to MaxChunkRadius, SpawnCapPlayerScaling, and the block tick settings. You'll probably need to tune these after a week or two of play once you see how your specific mix of players and mods behaves.

For a large or heavily modded server (15+ players or 20+ mods), you'll want to be more conservative with chunk radius and tick rates from the start. Each mod adds processing overhead and each player multiplies it.

The real trick with server settings is to change one thing at a time and see how it feels. Changing five settings at once means you have no idea which one helped and which one made things worse. Our configuration knowledgebase article goes into more detail on specific values, and if you run into actual problems, the troubleshooting guide covers the common issues.

The best server settings are the ones your players don't notice because everything just works. That's the goal – not maximum performance numbers, just a world that feels smooth and responsive when people are playing in it.