So your Windrose server isn't cooperating. Let's work through the usual suspects – I've seen most of these come up repeatedly since the Early Access launch, and the majority have straightforward fixes once you know where to look.
The Tutorial Thing
I'm putting this right at the top because honestly, nine times out of ten it's the tutorial thing.
Windrose requires every player to complete the singleplayer tutorial before multiplayer works. If someone tries to join your server without having done this, the connection just silently fails – no helpful error message, no prompt telling them what's wrong. They'll sit there staring at a loading screen or get dumped back to the menu.
This one catches people more than you'd expect. Someone buys the game, gets excited, skips straight to multiplayer, and then assumes the server is broken. It's not. Have them:
- Launch Windrose in singleplayer
- Play through the full tutorial sequence (takes maybe 15–20 minutes)
- Once it's done, exit and try connecting to the server again
That fixes it almost every time.
Connection Problems
If the tutorial's sorted and people still can't connect, there are a few other things to check.
Server Isn't Ready Yet
The host server needs to fully boot and load into the world before anyone else can join. If you've just started or restarted the server, give it a minute. You can watch progress in the Web Console or Log Viewer in your LOW.MS Control Panel – once you see the world finish loading, you're good to go.
Related to this: if your invite code says "not available yet," the server probably hasn't completed its first successful boot. Let it finish starting up, then check again.
Invite Code Issues
Windrose uses invite codes for connections, not the traditional IP:port approach. Players need to go to Play > Connect to Server > enter the invite code. We've got a full walkthrough at How to Join Your Windrose Server Using an Invite Code if anyone needs it.
A couple of things that trip people up with codes:
- They're case-sensitive, so
aBcandabcare different codes. Double-check for typos, especially characters likeland1orOand0. - Copy-pasting is your friend here. If the code is available in your control panel, grab it from there rather than trying to read it off someone's screenshot in Discord.
Version Mismatches
The game client version has to match the server version exactly. Steam likes to auto-update games, which means a player's client can get ahead of the server – or vice versa if you've manually triggered an update on one side but not the other.
When this happens, connections just fail. To fix it:
- In your LOW.MS Control Panel, stop the server
- Go to Steam Update and run a validation to pull the latest server files
- Have all players let Steam update their game client too
- Start the server back up
Everyone should be on the same version now.
DNS and Network Issues
If a specific player can connect from one network but not another, or connections are timing out without any obvious reason, DNS might be the culprit. Have them try switching to Google's public DNS servers – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. It's a quick change in their network adapter settings and resolves a surprising number of timeout issues.
VPNs and proxies can also interfere. If someone's running one, have them try disconnecting it temporarily to see if that's the problem.
On the local machine side, the player's firewall needs to allow the Windrose executable through. Windows Defender usually prompts for this on first launch, but if someone clicked "Block" without thinking – well, that'll do it.
Configuration File Problems
Windrose has two main config files you'll interact with: ServerDescription.json and WorldDescription.json. You can access these through the Configuration Files or File Manager sections in your control panel. Our Windrose Server Configuration Guide covers the settings in detail, but here's where things go wrong.
Editing While the Server Is Running
This is the big one. Windrose rewrites both config files on shutdown, so if you make changes while the server is running, it'll just overwrite everything you did when it shuts down. Your edits vanish.
Always:
- Stop the server from the control panel
- Make your config changes
- Save the files
- Start the server again
No exceptions. Even if you think "I'll just tweak this one thing real quick" – stop the server first.
Preset Gets Overridden to Custom
If you're using one of the built-in world presets and you manually edit any WorldSettings parameter, the game automatically converts your preset to "Custom" (which it calls Captain's Choice internally). This isn't a bug, it's by design – but it can be confusing if you didn't expect it.
If you want to stay on a specific preset, don't touch the individual world settings values. If you need custom values, accept that you're now running a Custom preset.
WorldIslandId Mismatch
Here's a less obvious one. The WorldIslandId value in ServerDescription.json must match the IslandId in WorldDescription.json. If these don't line up, the world simply won't load. This can happen if you're manually editing configs and copy settings from a different world or template.
Check both files and make sure those IDs are identical. If you're not sure what the value should be, the safest move is to restore from a working backup using Cloud Restore in the control panel.
Performance
Windrose is in Early Access, and performance reflects that – particularly with larger groups. The devs have acknowledged that late-game performance degrades when you go beyond four players. Four is genuinely the sweet spot right now, even though our plans technically support up to ten.
All LOW.MS Windrose plans come with 10GB of RAM, which is more than enough for the server itself. If you're seeing performance issues, it's almost certainly the game engine struggling with player count and late-game world complexity rather than a resource limitation on the server side.
Not much you can do about this one except keep group sizes reasonable until the devs optimise things further. Early Access and all that.
Save and World Issues
If your server starts but the world won't load, check the Log Viewer in your control panel for specific error messages. Common causes:
- The WorldIslandId mismatch I mentioned above
- Corrupted save data after a crash – try restoring from Cloud Backup via the panel
- Config files with invalid JSON (a missing comma or bracket will do it)
For JSON issues, you can paste the contents of your config files into any online JSON validator to find syntax errors. Usually it's something small – a trailing comma where there shouldn't be one, or a quote mark that got deleted during editing.
No Console Commands
If you're coming from other game servers, you might expect to be able to open a console and run admin commands. Windrose doesn't support this currently. The UE5 console is locked in the retail Early Access build, so server management is entirely through config files and the control panel.
The devs have indicated that admin tooling will expand during Early Access, so this should improve over time. For now, the Configuration Files section and File Manager in the control panel are your main tools for server management.
General Troubleshooting Steps
When something's wrong and you're not sure what, run through these:
- Open Log Viewer in the control panel and check for startup errors or crash messages
- Run Steam Update to verify and repair game files
- Restart the server – honestly, a clean restart resolves more issues than you'd think
- Make sure client and server versions match (see the version mismatch section above)
If none of that helps, check Current Activity & Stats to see if the server process is actually running, and look at resource usage for anything unusual.
Most Windrose server issues fall into one of the categories above. The tutorial requirement alone probably accounts for half the support tickets I've seen – once people know about that, everything else tends to fall into place pretty quickly.