Return to Moria Save Location & How to Upload Your World

You have been digging through Moria on your own PC, the hoard is building up, and now you want to move that world onto a proper dedicated server so your friends can join without you being online. Good news: Return to Moria stores your saves as plain .sav files, so moving a world over is a matter of copying your world file into the right folder and getting the server to load it. This guide walks through where those files sit, how to upload them to your LOW.MS server, and how to get the server to actually load your world instead of spinning up a fresh one. If you need the server itself, our Return to Moria server hosting is ready to go in a couple of minutes.

Where Return to Moria Saves Live on Your PC

Your local saves are stored under your Windows user profile, inside %LOCALAPPDATA%\Moria\Saved\. The quickest way to get there is to press Win + R, paste that path in, and hit Enter.

Inside Saved you will find one of two subfolders depending on how you bought the game:

• Steam: SaveGamesSteam
• Epic Games: SaveGamesEpic

Each world is made up of two files that share a matching ID:

• MW_<ID>.sav: the world itself (and its rolling backups)
• MC_<ID>.sav: your character data

You only need the MW_ world file to move a world to the server. Characters stay on whichever machine or account they were created on; players will spawn in fresh-bodied on the dedicated server and any gear they had locally does not carry over.

Before You Do Anything

A few quick precautions save a lot of grief later:

1. Stop the game on your PC before copying anything. If Moria is still running, the .sav file may be locked or mid-write.
2. Copy your local MW_ and MC_ files to a safe folder on your desktop as a personal backup.
3. In your LOW.MS panel at control.low.ms, stop the server, then open Cloud Backup and take a fresh snapshot. If anything goes sideways, Cloud Restore puts you back where you started.
4. Make sure the server has been started at least once so the SaveGamesDedicated folder exists.

Uploading via File Manager

For a single world file, the built-in File Manager in your LOW.MS panel is the simplest option.

1. In control.low.ms, open your Return to Moria server.
2. Stop the server from Web Console.
3. Open File Manager and navigate to Moria/Saved/SaveGamesDedicated/.
4. Click Upload and select your MW_<ID>.sav file from your PC.
5. Wait for the upload to finish; the file should appear in the directory listing with its full size.

If you do not see a SaveGamesDedicated folder at all, start the server once, let it sit for 30 seconds, then stop it again. The server creates the folder on first boot.

Uploading via SFTP

For larger transfers or if you want a proper client, use SFTP. LOW.MS runs SFTP on port 8822.

1. In the panel, open Service Settings and copy your SFTP username and password.
2. In your SFTP client (FileZilla, WinSCP, Cyberduck), create a new connection:
   • Protocol: SFTP
   • Host: the IP shown in Service Settings
   • Port: 8822
   • Username / Password: from Service Settings
3. Once connected, browse to Moria/Saved/SaveGamesDedicated/.
4. Drag your MW_<ID>.sav file from the local pane into that folder.

SFTP is also the easy way to pull a server-side world back down to your PC if you ever want to play it solo again.

Pointing the Server at Your World

Uploading the file is only half the job: the server still needs to be told to load it. On a self-hosted install that is a hand edit to MoriaServerConfig.ini, but on a LOW.MS server that file is managed by the panel, so it works a little differently.

• MoriaServerConfig.ini sits in the root of your server's files, not under Moria/Saved/Config/. You can open it from File Manager to see what it is doing.
• Its [World] section tells the server to load the world named LOWMS, and to create a fresh one with that name if none exists. Your uploaded world has its own name, so the server will not pick it up by itself.
• The panel rebuilds the file from a template, so a line you add by hand can be overwritten. That includes the OptionalWorldFilename key from Free Range Games' self-hosting guide, which is not part of our template.

Once your file is uploaded, keep the server stopped and open a ticket with the full filename, for example MW_A7BB8D3B4F9E5F00A664EE86E4B889AD.sav. We will point the server at that world for you.

Starting Up

Once we have confirmed the server is set to load your world, start it from Web Console and watch the log output. The first boot after a migration can take a minute longer than usual while the server ingests the world.

Once it says the session is ready, connect from the game's server browser or via Join by IP and confirm your base, chests, and terrain are exactly where you left them. If something looks off, stop the server and use Cloud Restore to roll back to the snapshot you took earlier.

A Few Things to Know

• Your local character file (MC_) is not used by the dedicated server. Everyone connects with their Epic/Steam account and gets a server-side character.
• Keep Cloud Backup enabled so the server takes rolling snapshots of the new world; the game's own .sav backups are limited.
• After a game update, let the server run Steam Update before players connect. A server on a different build from your players' game turns their joins away.
• If you have multiple MW_ files in SaveGamesDedicated, only the world the server is set to load is used. The others are ignored but take up disk.