How To Change, Reset, Or Upload A World On Your 7 Days To Die Server

Whether you want to bring an existing save over, roll the dice on a brand new random map, settle into a familiar developer-made one, or just wipe the slate clean, it all comes down to two settings in serverconfig.xml: GameWorld and GameName. This guide covers all four scenarios in one place.

Uploading an Existing World

If you've got a save from your own PC, a single-player game, or another host, you can bring it over and keep playing where you left off.

1. On the machine where the world currently lives, find the save folder — it's nested as Saves/[GameWorld]/[GameName]/.
2. If the world is a randomly generated (RWG) map rather than Navezgane or a pregenerated one, also grab the matching terrain folder from GeneratedWorlds/[world name]/. The save holds your progress; this folder holds the actual map itself, and RWG worlds need both.
3. Stop your server, open the Files tab, and upload both folders to the matching paths on your server.
4. Open serverconfig.xml and set GameWorld and GameName to match the folder names you just uploaded, exactly — capitalization included.
5. Save and start your server.

Creating a Randomly Generated World

Random World Generation (RWG) builds a brand new map from a text seed instead of loading a fixed layout. The same seed and size will always produce the same map, which makes it easy to regenerate or share a specific world with others.

1. Stop your server and open serverconfig.xml from the Files tab.
2. Set GameWorld to RWG.
3. Set WorldGenSeed to any text you like — this is your map's identity.
4. Set WorldGenSize to your preferred size: 4096, 6144, 8192, or 10240.
5. Set GameName to a new value so the server starts a fresh save rather than looking for an existing one.
6. Save and start your server.

One more thing worth knowing: 7 Days to Die's V3.0 "Dead Hot Summer" update reworked how RWG lays out cities, traders, and points of interest. A seed you remember fondly from before V3.0 will still work, but it won't generate the identical map it used to — the terrain rules underneath it have changed.

Selecting a Pregenerated World

Alongside Navezgane, the game ships with several other developer-made maps at fixed sizes. Unlike Navezgane, these are typically built using the same RWG technology, just generated ahead of time and shipped as a ready-to-use map rather than created fresh on your server.

1. Pregenerated maps get added and retired between game versions, so check what's actually available on your server before picking one — stop your server, open the Files tab, and look inside the game's Data/Worlds folder for the current list of names.
2. Open serverconfig.xml and set GameWorld to the exact name of the map you want, matching capitalization precisely.
3. Set GameName to a new value to start a fresh save on that map.
4. Save and start your server.

Resetting Your World

A "reset" is really just starting a new save — which is why what you reset to depends entirely on what GameWorld is already set to, and this is the part that trips people up:

Either way, if you want to keep the same map but hand everyone a totally fresh start, changing just GameName is all it takes. If you want an entirely new world, either switch to a different pregenerated map name or generate RWG with a new seed.

Troubleshooting

Getting a world set up exactly the way you want can take a little back and forth. If anything isn't behaving, no worries! Just open a support ticket and our team will be happy to help.