Aska Server Troubleshooting: Common Issues and Fixes
If your Aska server is misbehaving, honestly, 90% of the time it's the same three things: the GSLT has expired or got pasted wrong, the region is set to somewhere nobody in your group is searching, or the server has quietly paused itself because every player disconnected and keep server world alive is still on its default of false. We'll work through those first, then move on to the weirder Early Access bugs that come up in tickets every week.
Aska is still in Early Access (launched June 2024, dedicated server tooling followed in November 2024), so the bug surface shifts a bit with each patch. I'll flag what was definitely a bug, what's been partially patched, and what's still genuinely broken.
Server Not Appearing in the Browser
This one bites everybody at least once. You start the server, it spins up fine, you go into Aska, hit multiplayer, and – nothing.
Nine times out of ten it's the region. Aska filters the in-game server list by region, so if your server is set to EU and you're sitting on the NA tab, you will literally never see it. Open Configuration Files in the TCAdmin panel at https://control.low.ms, open server properties.txt, and make sure the region value matches what you and your friends are clicking in-game. If you change it, restart the server and give it a minute or two to re-register with Steam before you start refreshing.
A couple of other things worth checking while you're in there:
- Is the server actually finished starting? Open Web Console and look for the "ready to accept connections" line. On a big world it can take a couple of minutes, and the browser won't list you until Steam sees you.
- Password-protected servers get filtered out of some browser views. Tick the box to show them, or strip the password temporarily just to confirm visibility.
- If the browser is being stubborn, just direct-connect by IP and port from the panel. That bypasses Steam's list entirely and is honestly what I tell people to do the moment the browser argues with them.
Players Can't Connect
Server visible, player hits Join, bounces straight back out. In my experience this is almost always one of three things.
Password typos. Aska passwords are case-sensitive, and the server properties.txt file is easy to save with a trailing space you can't see. Open Configuration Files, delete the password line, retype it cleanly, save, restart.
GSLT expired or wrong. This is the big one. The Game Server Login Token is tied to App ID 1898300 and Steam does occasionally invalidate them, especially if the server went offline for a long time. Head to Steam's Game Server Account Management page, check the token is still listed and active, and if there's any doubt just generate a fresh one and paste it in. I've watched people spin a new GSLT three times before realising they had a stray space on the end of the token line – double-check yours is clean.
Session full. Aska caps out at 4 players per session at the game level. Not a LOW.MS limit, not something you can raise, that's just the game. If you've got a fifth friend trying to join, someone else has to drop.
Version mismatch. If Steam pushed an update and your server hasn't pulled it, nobody can connect. Run Steam Update from the panel sidebar, let it finish, restart, done. This happens constantly in the first 24 hours after a patch – we get tickets every week where the fix is literally "click Steam Update."
Server Crashes on Startup
If the server refuses to start at all, it's almost always the config or the save.
Bad config syntax is the most common culprit. Open server properties.txt via Configuration Files and look for the obvious stuff – missing =, a value that isn't one of the accepted options, a line that got mangled by a copy-paste. If you don't know what you changed, restore the previous version from backup and start again more carefully.
If the config looks clean, suspect the world save. A corrupted save will happily take the server down on boot. Your best friend here is Cloud Restore: roll back to the last known-good backup and restart. If you're dead-set on keeping the current world, you can try swapping the save id in the config to something else and see if a fresh world boots – that at least tells you whether the save itself is the problem.
Also worth checking your resources. Aska is heavier than it looks once you've got a village full of NPCs and a sprawling base. The 10 GB default is fine for most 4-player sessions, but 15 GB or more is a sensible step up once the settlement is mature. Both are configurable upgrades on your Aska server – pop up to 15, 20, 25, or 30 GB whenever you need it. Check Current Activity & Stats to see how close you're running to the limit.
Performance and Lag
If the server runs but everyone's rubber-banding, the answer is usually RAM, CPU, or distance.
RAM first. Open Current Activity & Stats and watch it for ten minutes of actual gameplay – not at idle. If you're sitting above 80% during invasions and a full village, you've outgrown your allocation. Bump it.
CPU second. Aska's world sim gets spicy during raid events, and on underpowered hardware that shows up as server-side lag during the attack, not client-side. The "Latest" CPU Performance upgrade lands you on our newest Ryzen 7950X/9950X boxes, and for a mature world that's worth the £10/mo more than almost anything else. Lowering monster density or wulfar population in server properties.txt may help on tighter hardware, but I'd treat that as a band-aid, not a cure.
Network third. Aska's invasion events aren't "Blood Moon", they're scheduled raid events, and you want your server physically near the majority of your group. If you're split across continents, pick somewhere central at checkout – we have multiple regions and the DDoS protection is included either way.
Gameplay Bugs Worth Knowing About
These are the ones that land in the ticket queue. Aska is Early Access, so expect this list to shift.
Villagers stuck in buildings. Really common, especially in carpentry huts. Don't demolish the building – that used to be the advice and it's mostly unnecessary now. In my experience the fastest fix is just to walk into the villager and physically shove them out, or save and reload the world, which bumps their pathfinding loose. There've been partial patches for this already, so if you're on the latest version it should be rarer than it used to be.
Interaction UI freezes in multiplayer. Storage containers, building management, the crafting UIs – they sometimes lock up for a single player in a co-op session. The actual fix is almost always: that player disconnects and rejoins. Server-side reboot won't help, it's client-state getting wedged. We get this in tickets a lot and the answer is genuinely "have them re-log."
Carts doing weird physics things. After the August 2025 patch the cart physics got less forgiving, and community reports say that once a cart starts misbehaving, closing and reopening the game client is often the only way to get it to settle. Placing on flat terrain helps prevent it, but once it's started glitching, don't waste an hour fighting it – just restart.
Winter invasion timer was wrong. You might find older forum threads about the raid-event countdown showing "today" when it's actually days out. That was a known bug earlier in Early Access and is resolved in recent patches. If you're still seeing it, check your in-game day counter and run Steam Update – you're behind.
Kennel keepers not feeding wolves. This has been reported and partially patched. If your wolves are starving, check two things: is there actually raw food in the warehouse the keeper can reach, and has the worker been assigned multiple jobs so they're spending half their day doing something else? Fix those before assuming it's the bug.
Updates
When Aska gets patched, your server needs to catch up or nobody can connect. The flow I'd recommend:
- Trigger Cloud Backup from the panel so you've got a known-good save.
- Run Steam Update to pull the latest server files.
- Restart, check Web Console for a clean startup, check Log Viewer if anything looks off.
- Have one player test-connect before the whole group tries.
Major updates occasionally need a fresh world – the devs will usually call that out in patch notes. That's exactly what Cloud Restore is for if you want to go back.
One thing worth flagging: the Aska dedicated server is Windows-only. There's no Linux depot. Not really troubleshooting as much as a fact people keep asking about, but it affects which tools you can use against it.
Backups
I'm going to labour this point because I've seen people lose 80 hours of village to one bad update. Cloud Backup runs on a schedule, but hit it manually before you change anything risky – before updates, before big config edits, before messing with the save ID. It takes ten seconds and it has saved more weekends than I can count.
If the worst happens, Cloud Restore from the panel, pick the most recent clean backup, done. If you like belt-and-braces, grab a copy of the save over FTP and keep it on your own machine too.
If you've worked through all of this and the server is still misbehaving, open a ticket – we'll happily jump on the box. 24/7 support, we can read your logs directly, and most of the time whatever's going wrong is something we've seen before. Useful reads while you wait: the Aska Getting Started guide, the Server Settings guide, and if you want the full setup walkthrough, how to host an Aska dedicated server or our best co-op settings post. For villager-specific headaches there's also the NPC villager management guide.