Space Engineers Save Location & How to Upload Your World

You have a Space Engineers world you care about — maybe a single-player build you want to share with friends, or a save from an old self-hosted server — and you want it running on your LOW.MS server. The move is straightforward once you know where the files sit and how the dedicated server picks them up. This guide walks through both.

Where Space Engineers Saves Live on Your PC

Space Engineers stores every world you create inside your Windows user profile, not in the Steam install directory. Open File Explorer, paste %APPDATA%\SpaceEngineers\Saves\ into the address bar, and press Enter. You will land in your Saves folder, which contains a subfolder named after your Steam ID (a long string of numbers). Inside that is one folder per world.

A world folder typically contains:

• Sandbox.sbc — world settings, mod list, GPS points, faction data
• Sandbox_config.sbc — session configuration
• SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbs — the actual grid and object data
• A Backup folder with prior auto-saves

If you were running your own dedicated server on a home PC before moving to LOW.MS, your worlds are in %APPDATA%\SpaceEngineersDedicated\<InstanceName>\Saves\ instead. Same file layout, different parent folder.

Before You Do Anything

Take a Cloud Backup of your LOW.MS server first. Open your service in control.low.ms and run Cloud Backup from the server page. If the upload goes wrong or you overwrite the wrong folder, Cloud Restore gets you back in one click.

Stop the server before uploading. Space Engineers writes to the active world on a regular interval, and dropping new files on top of a running session corrupts saves. Use the Stop button on the server page and wait for the status to go red.

Uploading via File Manager

For a single world under a few hundred megabytes, the built-in File Manager is the fastest path.

1. On your PC, copy the world folder (the one named after your world, not the Steam ID folder above it) to somewhere easy to find, like your desktop.
2. Right-click the folder and send it to a .zip archive.
3. In control.low.ms, open your Space Engineers server and click File Manager.
4. Navigate to Saves/.
5. Click Upload and select your zip.
6. Once the upload finishes, right-click the zip and choose Extract. You should end up with Saves/<YourWorldName>/Sandbox.sbc and friends.
7. Delete the zip to keep things tidy.

Uploading via SFTP

For larger worlds, worlds with a big Backup folder, or anything over about 500 MB, SFTP is the way.

1. Grab your SFTP credentials from the Service Settings tab in control.low.ms. The port is 8822.
2. Open FileZilla or WinSCP and connect.
3. On the remote side, browse to Saves/.
4. On the local side, browse to %APPDATA%\SpaceEngineers\Saves\<YourSteamID>\.
5. Drag your world folder across. Let the transfer run to completion — interrupted uploads leave half-written .sbs files that the server refuses to load.

Pointing the Server at Your World

Uploading the files is only half the job. The dedicated server loads whichever world is named in SpaceEngineers-Dedicated.cfg, so you need to update that value.

1. In File Manager, open SpaceEngineers-Dedicated.cfg at the root of your server.
2. Find the <LoadWorld> tag.
3. Set it to the full path of the world folder you just uploaded, for example C:\TCAFiles\Users\<user>\<id>\Saves\MyColony. The exact prefix shows in File Manager's breadcrumb.
4. Save the file.

If your LOW.MS panel exposes World Name as a setting under Service Settings, you can set it there instead of editing the config by hand — the panel writes the same value into the cfg on next start.

Starting Up

Back on the server page, click Start and open the Web Console. Watch for a line similar to Loading world MyColony followed by Game ready. That confirms the server found your upload and the files are intact.

Connect from the Space Engineers client, browse the server list or join by IP, and you should spawn into your world exactly where you left it.

If the console shows World not found or the server starts a brand-new random world, the path in <LoadWorld> does not match a folder under Saves/. Recheck the spelling and folder depth.

A Few Things to Know

Mods travel with the world. The mod list is baked into Sandbox.sbc, and the dedicated server downloads each Steam Workshop mod on first start. Give it a few extra minutes on that first boot.

Do not leave stray files in the world folder. Space Engineers deletes anything it does not recognise when it saves, so move old screenshots or notes somewhere else before uploading.

Skip the Steam ID folder. Copy the world folder itself, not the numbered parent directory — the dedicated server looks for worlds directly under Saves/.

Run a Steam Update after uploading if your world was created on a newer game build than your server is running. Outdated binaries will refuse to load newer save formats.