How to Create a Valheim Dedicated Server

Valheim needs two ports, a world name and a password — that is it. Here is the whole setup, plus how to make the server public and how to bring an existing world across.

Valheim is the rare survival game that gets better with a dedicated server: your world keeps its progress whether you are online or not, everyone plays on the same map instead of copying save files around, and the server handles the world simulation so nobody's PC has to stay on. On SadHost that server is free.

How Valheim hosting works here

The panel installs the official Valheim Dedicated Server tool through SteamCMD for you, then runs it with your chosen settings. You need to own Valheim on Steam to play, but the server software itself is free and needs no Steam login — there is nothing to authenticate.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• Valheim needs two ports, not one. The game port (2456 by default) handles gameplay, and the next port (2457) answers Steam queries so the server can be discovered and so the panel can tell whether anyone is playing. The panel reserves the pair for you — if you ever change one, change both.
• Crossplay is intentionally off. Valheim's crossplay mode routes through PlayFab, which stops the server answering the query protocol. That breaks player counting and hibernation wake-on-join, so SadHost keeps crossplay disabled and uses standard Steam connections instead. Everyone joining from a PC copy of the game is unaffected.

Step 1 — Create the server

1. Sign in with Discord and open the Create Server wizard.
2. Choose Valheim as the game and pick a region near your group — Viking combat is melee-heavy, so latency is more noticeable than in most games.
3. Name the server and create it. The installer downloads the game files, which takes a few minutes.

Step 2 — Fill in the four settings that matter

Step 3 — How your friends join

• Public server: it appears in the in-game Join Game list — search for your server name once it has finished starting.
• Steam friends: right-click your name in Steam → Join Game. This is the easiest route and works for private servers.
• Direct connection: Start Game → Join IP, then enter host:2456 — for example play.example.com:2456 if you reserved a free subdomain, or 203.0.113.10:2456. Remember that Valheim uses the game port here, and the query port is the next one.

Wait for the console to say the server is up before trying: Valheim generates a fresh world on first start, which takes a minute or two, and connections during generation are simply refused.

Bringing an existing Valheim world across

1. Stop your old server or game so the save files are fully written, then copy worlds_local/ from it. You want both the <world>.db and <world>.fwl files — the DB holds the world, the FWL holds the world metadata.
2. Upload them to your SadHost server's worlds_local/ folder using the file manager.
3. Set WORLD to exactly the file name you uploaded (without the extension), then start the server.
4. Verify by joining and checking that the map and your inventory are where you left them. The panel's Backups tab can snapshot the world afterwards.

What a free plan handles

Valheim is nowhere near as heavy as a modded Minecraft server. With 5 GB of RAM and two vCores you can comfortably host a group of two to five Vikings; world simulation is the main cost and it scales with how much of the map you have explored. Characters and terrain are cheap, whereas enormous explored areas and big builds with lots of tamed creatures cost more. If things get sluggish, the order of attack is: reduce the number of always-running fires and kilns, keep all your bases in a smaller explored region, and only then look at mods.

Disk is the limit to watch: every explored region is written to the save, and each save is snapshotted as a backup. Free plans have 5 GB, which typically holds a large Viking campaign plus the game files. If you are exploring aggressively, download a copy of worlds_local/ and delete the older automatic backup files inside it.

Troubleshooting

• Server will not start, password error — the password is under five characters or appears in the server name. Change one of the two.
• Nobody can find it in the server list — PUBLIC_SERVER is off, or the server is still generating. Turn it on, or use Join IP instead.
• "Failed to connect" — check you are using the game port (2456) rather than the query port, and that the second port in the pair was not changed on its own.
• World looks empty after a restart — WORLD no longer matches the file name in worlds_local/; Valheim generated a fresh world with the new name.
• Server is asleep — that is hibernation working as intended. Joining wakes it; the wake takes a few seconds longer than a normal spin-up.

Next up: installing Valheim mods with BepInEx, or the hibernation helpdesk article if you want to understand exactly when your world sleeps.

Updated 22 September 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us on Discord or email support@sadhost.com and we will fix it.