Somebody in your Discord has asked whether you can turn growth up, and you've gone hunting for the setting. It isn't in the panel. That's not a bug and you haven't missed a tab, it's just that Path of Titans on LOW.MS hands you a much smaller set of switches than most games do, and everything else sits in a text file you have to go and open yourself.
This guide is about which is which. I've checked all of it against the config template our panel actually builds your server from (not against a generic PoT guide), so where our setup differs from what Alderon's documentation describes, I've said so instead of quietly papering over it.
If your server isn't up yet, start with Path of Titans getting started. If you're carrying configs over from somewhere else, the save upload guide covers that side of it.
Where Path of Titans settings actually live
Two places, and the split matters more here than on most games.
Service Settings in the LOW.MS Control Panel holds the handful of values our panel injects when it builds your config files and your launch line. Server name, join password, auth token, map, branch, database mode. Change one, save, restart, done.
Everything else is a plain text file under your service root, reached through File Manager:
PathOfTitans\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\Game.ini
PathOfTitans\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\GameUserSettings.ini
PathOfTitans\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\Commands.ini
PathOfTitans\Saved\MOTD.txt
PathOfTitans\Saved\Rules.txt
PathOfTitans\Saved\Bans.txt
PathOfTitans\Saved\Mutes.txt
PathOfTitans\Saved\Whitelist.txt
Windows paths, because we run Windows. If a guide has told you to go looking in LinuxServer/, that's a self-hosting guide and it doesn't describe your server.
The Game.ini we ship is short on purpose:
[/Script/PathOfTitans.IGameSession]
ServerName=<set from Service Settings>
ServerPassword=<set from Service Settings>
bServerPaidUsersOnly=false
bServerAllowChat=true
bServerGlobalChat=true
bServerFish=true
bServerWaterQualitySystem=true
bServerWaystoneCooldownRemoval=true
bServerFallDamage=true
ServerDiscord=
bServerAutoRestart=false
RestartLengthInSeconds=10800
ServerDeadBodyTime=0
[/Script/PathOfTitans.IGameMode]
ServerStartingTime=1350
bServerDynamicTimeOfDay=1
ServerDayLength=240
MaxGroupSize=10
MaxGroupLeaderCommunicationDistance=50000
[BattlEye]
bEnabled=true
That is the entire file. Alderon's option list runs to several hundred keys, so the overwhelming majority of what you'll read about online isn't in there at all: those settings are sitting at the game's own internal default until you type the line in yourself.
A few of the ones we do ship are worth understanding, because they don't read the way you'd expect. ServerDeadBodyTime=0 means corpses stay forever: zero is infinite here, not instant. ServerStartingTime=1350 is ten to two in the afternoon on a 0-2400 clock, and that's what the world snaps back to every time the server restarts. ServerDayLength=240 gives you a four-hour day cycle, and since we don't ship a ServerNightLength line, night runs at the game's default length. Alderon's two documentation sources disagree with each other about what that default is (one says 240 minutes, the other 30), so I'd set both lines explicitly if the length of your nights matters to your community. bServerWaystoneCooldownRemoval=true lets players burn marks to clear a waystone cooldown instead of waiting it out, which is the one most server owners turn off first on a hardcore ruleset.
The five things you set from Service Settings
Open your service, open Service Settings, and you get five Path of Titans variables on top of the usual server name and password fields.
Auth Token is the one that's mandatory. Generate it on your Alderon Games account at the hosting token page, paste it in, save. The page won't show you the same token twice (that's deliberate on Alderon's part, not a bug), so copy it before you leave. Our panel writes it into the launch script every single time the server starts, which means changing it here and restarting is genuinely all you need to do: there's no second place it's cached. There's also a Set AuthToken button on the service page that just echoes the current value back at you, handy for confirming the save landed.
Database is a dropdown with two options, Local and Remote, and it's the most consequential setting on this page. Local keeps every account and character as JSON on your own server under PathOfTitans\Saved\DatabaseCache\. Remote hands all of that to Alderon's managed cloud database, which is what you want if you're running more than one server and you'd like dinosaurs to move between them.
Read Alderon's own warning before you touch it: player data does not transfer when you switch. Going Local to Remote loses what's on disk, going Remote to Local starts you empty. It's the single most expensive mistake available on this page (an entire community's characters, gone on a dropdown change), so take a Cloud Backup first, every time.
Branch is the Path of Titans build channel. It's what the Update button feeds to Alderon's updater when it pulls a new build, and on the custom launch line it's also passed to the server as -BranchKey. The ready-made lines in Commandline Manager, Default included, have -BranchKey=production written into them and don't read this field. production is the normal value and almost nobody should change it. Branch Password exists for the closed branches Alderon occasionally hands out to testers, and stays empty otherwise.
Map picks which level the server boots. More on that next, because there's a wrinkle.
The things that look like settings but aren't: your slot count comes straight off your plan and is passed to the server on the launch line, so adding MaxPlayers= to Game.ini achieves nothing. Same for ServerName, which the panel writes into both the config file and the launch line from your Service Settings field. Your game port is whatever the panel assigned you, with the query port one above it, and both are on the launch line too.
RCON is a different story. The panel sets aside the game port plus two for it, which is also Alderon's default RCON port, but neither our launch line nor our Game.ini turns it on, and Alderon ship it switched off. If you want an external RCON tool, add a [SourceRCON] block to Game.ini with bEnabled=true and a Password= of at least eight characters, and read the rebuild warning at the bottom of this page first, because that block is exactly the kind of hand edit that gets wiped. Day to day, PoT admin work happens through in-game chat commands and the roles you'll set up further down.
Choosing a map
There are two routes to this and they don't offer quite the same list, which is worth knowing before you go looking for a map that seems to have disappeared.
Commandline Manager carries six ready-made launch lines: Default (Panjura), Default with -useperfthreads, Cerulean Island, Gondwa, Stoneclaw Highlands, and Riparia. Pick one, save, restart. The useperfthreads variant is an Unreal Engine flag that moves some engine work onto its own threads; I haven't measured whether it does anything useful on PoT specifically, so treat it as worth trying rather than as advice.
The Map dropdown in Service Settings offers four: Panjura, CeruleanIsland, Island and StoneclawHighlands. Note that Island is Gondwa: that's the internal level name, and it's confused a lot of people over the years, including whoever labelled our dropdown. Note also that Riparia isn't in that list even though it's in Commandline Manager, so if you want Riparia, the predefined command line is your route.
The two routes don't combine. Every ready-made line has its map written into it and ignores the dropdown, and that includes Default, which always boots Panjura. The dropdown only takes effect on the custom launch line, the one built from your Service Settings values. So if you've changed the dropdown and the server keeps loading Panjura, check which launch line it's on before anything else.
Panjura, Gondwa and Riparia are Alderon's three official maps. Cerulean Island and Stoneclaw Highlands both appear in our panel, but I couldn't line either of them up against Alderon's current published map list (they may be older names, they may be community maps), so I'd boot one on a throwaway server before announcing it to your community.
One trap: plenty of PoT guides tell you to set ServerMap= inside Game.ini to pick a stock map. That is not how our servers pick one. The level name arrives as the first argument on the launch line, and that's what the server boots. Setting it in Game.ini as well is at best redundant and at worst a source of confusion when the server keeps loading a map you thought you'd changed. Modded maps are the exception, because Alderon's documentation does ask for a ServerMap= line alongside the mod ID; the troubleshooting guide covers that case.
Growth, marks and nesting
Here's the honest answer: none of these are in our template. Not one. If you want them, you're adding lines to Game.ini by hand through File Manager, and you should read the next section before you do, because there's a way to lose that work.
The keys Alderon documents, all of them in [/Script/PathOfTitans.IGameSession]:
bServerGrowth=true
GlobalPassiveGrowthPerMinute=0
QuestGrowthMultiplier=1
QuestMarksMultiplier=1.0
CombatDeathMarksPenaltyPercent=25
CombatDeathGrowthPenaltyPercent=10
FallDeathMarksPenaltyPercent=5
FallDeathGrowthPenaltyPercent=2
SurvivalDeathMarksPenaltyPercent=10
SurvivalDeathGrowthPenaltyPercent=5
QuestGrowthMultiplier and QuestMarksMultiplier are the two most people actually want: they scale what quests pay out, so 2 roughly doubles the rate at which your players grow and earn. GlobalPassiveGrowthPerMinute is a different animal: it ticks growth onto everyone regardless of what they're doing, and it's off by default. A small value there suits a roleplay server where nobody wants to grind quests. It suits a competitive server not at all.
Nesting has its own large block, with bServerNesting=true as the master switch and a long tail of tuning underneath it: MinNestingGrowth, NestResourceMultiplier, bNestsInvulnerable, the despawn timers, the adoption rules. Alderon's server configuration reference has the full set with defaults, and it's the source I'd trust over any hosting company's summary of it, ours included.
Now the thing people keep asking me about, and I want to be plain about it: there is no combat toggle and no passive mode. I went through Alderon's whole documented option list looking for one and there isn't a bServerPvE, a bDisableCombat, or anything that plays that role. Path of Titans doesn't ship a PvP switch. What you can do instead is make dying cheap by dropping CombatDeathMarksPenaltyPercent and CombatDeathGrowthPenaltyPercent towards zero, keep bServerAntiRevengeKill on so someone can't relog and immediately come back for you, and enforce the rest socially through Rules.txt and your moderators. Any guide promising you a one-line passive server is describing a mod, not the base game.
Admin roles, MOTD and the ban list
Commands.ini is where admin permissions live, and ours arrives pre-populated with four roles: Owner, Admin, Moderator and Creator, each with its own permission list and chat colour. Owner gets everything, right down to whitelist and reloadbans. Creator gets almost nothing beyond teleport and announce, which is exactly right for someone shooting screenshots, and worth remembering before you hand it to a moderator by mistake.
The file ends with an empty [PlayerRoles] section, and that's the bit you fill in. One line per person, Alderon Games ID on the left, role name on the right:
[PlayerRoles]
525-053-709=Owner
123-456-789=Moderator
Stop the server before you edit it. You can also promote people live with /promote <playername> <rolename> in chat once you've got a role of your own, which is usually faster than a restart.
MOTD.txt shows on every login. Rules.txt shows once and won't come back until the player closes and reopens it. Both accept Alderon's own tag set (<title>, <large>, <small>, <red>, <orange>, <yellow>, <green>, <blue>, <purple>, <white>) and every tag closes with a bare </>. You can't combine them, so no bold red titles.
Bans.txt, Mutes.txt and Whitelist.txt are colon-separated and documented inline in the files themselves. A ban line is Alderon ID or IP, then an expiry as a Unix timestamp where 0 means forever, then an admin-facing reason, then the reason the player sees:
525-053-709:0:KOSing in safe zones:Stay out of my server
The whitelist is just IDs, one per line. Enforcement is a separate Game.ini key, bEnforceWhitelist, which we don't ship. Alderon's docs say it defaults to true, which I don't quite believe given our servers accept anyone with an empty whitelist file, so set it explicitly to true when you actually want a whitelist and test with a second account before you rely on it.
Mods, and why your edits might not stick
GameUserSettings.ini is the mod file, and ours ships as nothing but commented-out examples:
[PathOfTitans.Mods]
;Example below of adding two mods
;TheGrimExpanse
;EnabledMods="UGC_M_DYV7XYEGX2_SK"
One EnabledMods= line per mod, using the mod.io UGC ID, and the server pulls them down itself on the next boot. You don't upload anything. Give the first start after a mod change a bit longer than usual while it downloads.
[PathOfTitans.Mods] is the section our template writes and the one our servers read, so if an older guide points you at a different section name for mods, go by this one.
And now the caveat that hangs over this whole article. All eight of those files are flagged in our panel to be rebuilt from our template. Anything with a token behind it (server name, join password) survives that rebuild, because the panel writes your value straight back in. Anything you typed in yourself does not. A reinstall will do it. Saving a change in Service Settings can do it. The failure mode is unpleasant precisely because it's delayed: your rates work fine for three weeks, you bump your slot count, and the next restart is quietly running stock defaults with nobody sure why.
So the habit worth forming is dull and it works. Stop the server, make your edit, start the server, then download a copy of Game.ini and Commands.ini out of File Manager and keep them somewhere local. Takes about ten seconds. Re-uploading a known-good file beats reconstructing three weeks of tuning from memory.
If you'd rather your growth rates and nesting values be baked into the template so they survive rebuilds properly, open a ticket and ask. That's a change on our side rather than yours, we're happy to make it, and it turns the whole problem off. Support is 24/7 and there's no prize for fighting a config file alone for two hours first.