Don't Starve Together World Settings and Regeneration

Don't Starve Together world settings: worldgenoverride.lua, presets, and regenerating a world without losing the cluster.

Updated September 12, 2026

Don't Starve Together

World settings on a Don't Starve Together server live in worldgenoverride.lua, and there is one of them inside each shard folder — Master/worldgenoverride.lua for the surface and Caves/worldgenoverride.lua for the underground. There is a second, very similar file called leveldataoverride.lua sitting next to it, and you should not touch that one.

Checked against Don't Starve Together dedicated server build 747465

Quotes below are from the comments and code Klei ship inside the dedicated server itself (Steam app 343050), which Klei explicitly invite people to read, plus their update notes. Verified 12 September 2026.

Two files, and only one is yours

Klei's own comment in the server's shardindex.lua is the clearest statement of the difference anyone has written:

leveldataoverride is for GAME USE. It contains a complete level definition and is used by the clusters to transfer level settings reliably from the client to the cluster servers. It completely overrides existing saved world data.
worldgenoverride is for USER USE.

So: leveldataoverride.lua is what the game writes when someone configures a world in the client and pushes it to a cluster. worldgenoverride.lua is the one a server owner edits by hand. Editing the wrong one is the most common way to lose a world.

What goes in the file

The server accepts exactly five top-level keys. Anything else is ignored with a warning:

Key	What it does
`override_enabled`	Master switch. `false` and the file is read but not applied
`worldgen_preset`	The preset used to generate the map
`settings_preset`	The preset used for world rules
`preset`	Legacy single key, still accepted; fills in for both of the above
`overrides`	A table of individual settings layered on top

A minimal file looks like this:

return {
  override_enabled = true,
  worldgen_preset = "SURVIVAL_TOGETHER",
  settings_preset = "SURVIVAL_TOGETHER",
  overrides = {
    winter = "shortseason",
    summer = "shortseason",
    hounds = "rare",
    regrowth = "fast",
  },
}

Master/worldgenoverride.lua

Every overrides entry takes a named value rather than a number — mostly "never", "rare", "default", "often", "always", with season lengths using "veryshortseason" through "verylongseason" and regrowth using "veryslow" through "veryfast". Anything left at "default" can simply be left out.

Playstyle presets

These are the preset names the server actually recognises. Surface presets come from the forest level definitions, caves presets from the caves definitions — they are not interchangeable.

Shard	Presets
Master	`SURVIVAL_TOGETHER`, `RELAXED`, `ENDLESS`, `WILDERNESS`, `LIGHTS_OUT`, `TERRARIA`, `SURVIVAL_TOGETHER_CLASSIC`, `SURVIVAL_DEFAULT_PLUS`, `COMPLETE_DARKNESS`
Caves	`DST_CAVE`, `DST_CAVE_PLUS`, `TERRARIA_CAVE`

Set the playstyle on Master only

Klei changed this in October 2022: "The overrides table for the desired playstyle no longer need to be set on every shard. When set on the master server, they will automatically be sent to the caves server (or any other secondary shard)." Their instruction is to stop listing every setting and instead "only on the master server, set worldgen_preset and settings_preset to 'RELAXED', 'ENDLESS', 'SURVIVAL_TOGETHER', 'WILDERNESS', or 'LIGHTS_OUT'."

This is also where Endless and Wilderness went. They used to be game_mode values in cluster.ini; Klei converted them to presets and the server now rewrites the old game-mode values back to survival on startup.

The file tells you when you get it wrong

Unusually for a config file, the DST server sanity-checks worldgenoverride.lua on load and prints exactly what it did not understand:

WARNING! Found entry '%s' in worldgenoverride.lua, but this isn't a valid entry.
WARNING! Found override '%s', but this doesn't match any known option. Did you make a typo?
WARNING! Found value '%s' for setting '%s', but this is not a valid value. Use one of {%s}.

text

It also prints Loaded and applied world gen overrides from ... on success, and Found world gen overrides but not enabled. when override_enabled is missing or false. Read the console after a restart and you will know immediately whether your edit took.

Our egg only places worldgenoverride.lua during installation

The starter worldgenoverride.lua files in Master/ and Caves/ are fetched once, when the server is installed. After that they are ordinary files in your File Manager — edit them there, and reinstalling is what would replace them.

Regenerating a world

Klei ship two console commands, and their own comments say which to use:

Command	Klei's note
`c_regenerateworld()`	"Permanently delete all game worlds in a server cluster, regenerates new worlds afterwards… This will not work properly for any shard that is offline or in a loading state"
`c_regenerateshard()`	"It is not recommended to use this instead of c_regenerateworld, unless you need to regenerate only one shard in a cluster"

c_regenerateshard takes an optional argument: called plain, it preserves your world settings and only rebuilds the map. Pass c_regenerateshard(true) and the settings are wiped too.

Both are remote console commands, so run them in remote mode from the shard you mean to affect — see Don't Starve Together console commands for how local and remote mode differ.

Save data for each shard lives under its own folder, at Master/save/ and Caves/save/ inside the cluster directory. That is what to copy before you experiment, and it is why a backup of the whole cluster folder is the only backup worth having.

Regenerating is immediate and permanent

There is no confirmation prompt. c_regenerateworld() takes the surface and the caves together. If you only meant to reset one, you wanted c_regenerateshard(), run while standing in the world you want gone.

For a smaller step backwards, cluster.ini's max_snapshots controls how many rollback points the cluster keeps — Klei's default is 6, and each one is written every time the server saves.

Common Questions

Where is worldgenoverride.lua on a hosted server?

DoNotStarveTogether/config/server/Master/worldgenoverride.lua and the matching file under Caves/, reachable in the File Manager or over SFTP on your Don't Starve Together server.

Do world setting changes apply to an existing world?

Preset changes regenerate; the individual overrides are layered onto the save data the server already has. The reliable way to get a genuinely fresh world on new settings is to set them first and then regenerate.

Should I edit leveldataoverride.lua?

No. Klei describe it as "for GAME USE" — it is how the client pushes a complete world definition to a cluster, and it "completely overrides existing saved world data". Server owners use worldgenoverride.lua.

How do I reset only the caves?

Stand in the caves and run c_regenerateshard(). c_regenerateworld() would take the surface with it.

Why did my world setting not apply?

Check the console after a restart. The server names every unrecognised entry, unknown option and invalid value by hand, and prints "Found world gen overrides but not enabled" if override_enabled is not true.

Can Master and Caves have different settings?

They can have different presets — the caves presets are a separate set — but since October 2022 the playstyle overrides you set on Master are pushed to Caves automatically, so you no longer duplicate them.