How to move a Valheim world save

If you need to move a world save from one server to another, or from your local machine to a server, this shouldn’t be too painful ;)

The default location that Valheim saves world files is:

Windows: %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim/worlds/

Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds/

If you have rented a server from a game server provider, double check with their support information where they store save files, as they may use a custom location.

There will likely be 4 files stored for each world:

world.fwl
world.fwl.old
world.db
world.db.old

Where “world” is the name of your world. If you want to double check the name of your world, you can see it in-game by pressing F2.

The .old files are backups, and not strictly necessary for the purpose of the transfer.

World re-nameing

Do not change the name of your .fwl or .db files, as this will break things.

If your circumstances absolutely require changing the world name, use this tool: https://geekstrom.de/valheim/fwl/

FTP Transfer Modes

If you are interacting with a server to upload/download files using FTP, (and you’re on Windows) using WinSCP is recommended.

If you use FileZilla (or other software) instead, make sure that the file transfer type is set to BINARY.

WinSCP uses binary transfer for files by default, but FileZilla may not and this has caused some issues for users.

Steps

1. On the source machine, locate the world save files.

2. Take a back-up copy of these files and set aside in case anything goes wrong.

3. On the destination machine, ensure that the -world parameter in the server start script matches the name of your world, and start the destination server.

   Once the destination server has completely started up, shut it down again. This will have created world files on the destination machine that you will now replace.

4. Navigate to the worlds/ directory on the destination machine, and confirm that world files are present, with the same name as your old world files.

5. Replace the world files on the destination machine, with those from the source machine.

6. You can now start the server on the destination machine again, and it will load the world from the files you have just added.

External links

If you are hosting with g-portal, their support guidance can be found here: https://www.g-portal.com/wiki/en/vallheim-settings-and-server/#how-to-upload-your-own-world