How to Move Your Hytale World to a Server (and Keep Your Character)

Where your save is

Single-player saves are in the game's data folder, inside UserData and then Saves. The quickest way: in the Hytale launcher, the settings cog → “Open Directory” → “User Data”, and inside it, Saves. That button always opens the right folder.

By hand, on Windows: press the Windows key, type %appdata% and go into Hytale, UserData and Saves. On macOS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/Hytale/UserData/Saves, and on Linux in ~/.local/share/Hytale/UserData/Saves. Those are the paths for the normal (release) version: if you play on another launcher branch, such as pre-release, its saves are kept separately, inside Hytale/data.

Inside there's one folder per save, and inside each one, the universe folder. That's the one that matters: universe/worlds has one folder per world (the terrain and everything built) and universe/players, one file per player (inventory, position and progress).

Hytale is in early access and a path may change from one version to the next: if you can't find it, look for the universe folder inside UserData.

The whole universe or just one world?

If you upload the whole universe, the server ends up just like your save: the worlds and what each player was carrying. That's what almost everyone wants.

If you upload just one world (a folder from universe/worlds), you take the terrain and what's built, but not the inventories: player data goes with its universe, not with each world. It's useful for adding a map to a server that already has its own save.

Moving it to your NapNodes server

1. Link the server if it's new

   The first time you start it, the panel asks you to link it to your Hytale account and the server downloads the game. Until then there's no Server folder, which is where your world goes.

2. Stop it

   With “Stop”. Hytale saves on its own and makes its own backups every half hour: if you upload files while the server is running, it may overwrite them.

3. Keep what's there

   If the server already had a save, make a backup in “Backups” before replacing it. Hytale's own backups are there too, in Server/backups (how to use them).

4. Compress your universe

   Make a .zip of your save's universe folder. The panel won't let you upload whole folders, but it will take a compressed file. If it's big, you can upload it with a program like FileZilla (SFTP): the connection details are in “Advanced settings” → “SFTP” and the password is created in “My account” → “SFTP password”.

5. Upload and extract it

   In “Files”, go into Server, rename the existing universe folder (for example, to universe-old) and upload your .zip. Then, from the file's menu, “Decompress”.

6. Check there's no extra folder

   You should end up with Server/universe/worlds and Server/universe/players. If you see Server/universe/universe or a folder with your save's name in between, move its contents up one level.

7. Start it and join

   With “Start”. Join from the game with the address and port from the panel and check your base is where you left it.

If a new or empty world appears

It's almost always one of three things: the folder ended up nested (Server/universe/universe), it was uploaded with the server running, or the server's default world isn't named like yours. That last one is in Server/config.json, in the Defaults section, with the name of the world it loads when you join: it has to match the name of a folder in universe/worlds (the config.json guide explains it; on NapNodes it's the “World” setting in “Settings”). The server rewrites config.json while it's running, so change it with the server stopped.

If your save used mods, upload them too, to the Server/mods folder (how, in the guide to mods on a Hytale server): without them, anything that depends on those mods won't load. And keep your original folder on your PC until you've checked everything is fine: when it opens a world, a newer version of the game may convert it (Update 7, for example, moves worlds to a format that takes up less space the first time it loads them).

From here on, the save that counts is the one on the server. If you keep playing on your PC as well, each one moves on separately: pick one.

And if it's just to try it out

On NapNodes you can do it with the free Hytale server, no card needed: it has the RAM of the Village plan and 15 GB of disk, and it stops after 20 minutes empty. Check how much your universe folder takes up before uploading it. If you want the world always online, move to a plan and it stays the same server with your world.

Frequently asked questions