How to Upload Your Existing World to Your Valheim Server

Yes — the world you started in singleplayer or hosted co-op moves straight onto a dedicated server. A Valheim world is just two files with the same name, a .db and a .fwl, and the server loads whichever pair matches its World Name setting. You need the two files from your PC, about five minutes, and a server you can stop and start.

Everything below happens in two tabs of your Valheim game server panel: the File Manager for the upload and the Startup tab for the world name. Your characters are not part of the move — Valheim stores them on each player's own machine, so everyone keeps their skills and inventory automatically.

Where Valheim Stores Local Worlds

Valheim has had a native macOS build since June 2024, on both Steam and the Mac App Store, but the two store it differently — the Steam build under ~/Library/Application Support/, the sandboxed App Store build under ~/Library/Containers/. Iron Gate document the Windows and Linux paths and not the Mac one, and the guides that fill the gap disagree with each other, so use Finder's Go → Go to Folder… and search for worlds_local rather than trusting a path you were given.

Worlds created before 20 June 2022 (patch 0.209.8) may still sit in the older worlds\ folder next to worlds_local\. That patch moved local saves into worlds_local and characters_local so they would stop syncing to Steam Cloud, and a legacy world migrates across the first time you load and save it — so if a world is still in worlds\, open it once in game and it will move itself. Xbox and Microsoft Store (Game Pass) saves are not loose files at all — they live in an opaque WGS container of GUID-named blobs under %LocalAppData%\Packages\, so there is no .db/.fwl pair to copy by hand.

Playing through Steam Cloud?

If Steam Cloud sync is on, your newest world may exist only in Steam\userdata\<your id>\892970\remote rather than worlds_local. Select the world in the world list and use Move to Local first, then copy it out of worlds_local. (The Manage Saves screen is the backup restore-and-delete menu — a different thing.)

Step 1: Find Your World's .db and .fwl Pair

Open worlds_local and find the two files named after your world — for a world called Midgard, that is Midgard.db and Midgard.fwl. The .db holds everything you have built and explored; the .fwl holds the seed and world metadata.

You need both. The .fwl is what carries the world's name and seed, so a .db uploaded without it has nothing to anchor it. The server finds no matching pair for its world name, generates a brand-new world under that name, and writes over your orphaned .db — which is why a half-upload loses the world rather than just failing.

The folder holds more than the pair. Ignore the .db.old and .fwl.old twins and any <world>_backup_auto-<timestamp> files — those are Valheim's own rolling backups — and ignore the minimap cache files. You want the plain .db and .fwl only.

Step 2: Stop the Server

Click Stop on the Console tab and wait for the process to exit. Uploading world files into a running server risks the server's own save cycle overwriting them mid-copy.

Step 3: Upload Both Files

In the File Manager, open the worlds_local/ folder. On a stock Linux install Valheim keeps its saves under ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/, but on your server the save directory is the server root — so worlds_local/ sits at the top level, alongside adminlist.txt.

Upload both files — the .db and the .fwl. For worlds over a few hundred MB, SFTP is faster and resumes interrupted transfers; the target folder is the same.

Do not rename either file. The base name is the world's identity, and the server matches it exactly — on Linux, capitalisation included.

Step 4: Set the World Name

Open the Startup tab and find World File Name. Set it to your world's base name — Midgard, not Midgard.db. This is Valheim's -world launch argument: the server loads the matching pair from worlds_local, and if nothing matches it generates a brand-new world under that name, which is the failure you are trying to avoid. The full Startup field reference covers the rest.

Step 5: Start and Verify

Hit Start and watch the Console for the server to come up with your world's name in the boot output. Then join in-game: the real check is the world itself — your spawn point, a landmark you built, the day counter on the sleep screen.

Take a snapshot through the Backups tab once the world is confirmed live, so the freshly migrated state is the thing you can roll back to. See How to create a backup.

Common Issues

• The server generated a new empty world: The World Name does not exactly match the uploaded files' base name, or the .fwl is missing. Check spelling and capitalisation against the File Manager listing.
• My newest progress is missing: Steam Cloud was holding a newer copy than worlds_local. Use Move to Local on the world in game, then re-upload the pair.
• World loads but my character is level 1: Characters never live on the server. Each player's character travels with their own client (characters_local on their PC) — the player who "lost" a character is signed into a different machine or Steam account.
• The world was fine, then rolled back: Valheim keeps .old copies of both files and falls back to them when the current pair will not read, so a bad shutdown can surface an older state. Restore your own latest snapshot from the Backups tab rather than re-uploading over it.
• Server and client versions differ: A world saved on a newer game build will not load on an older server. Keep automatic updates on, and make sure your own game is not on a beta branch.

A new save format is on the public test branch

In patch 0.221.13 (6 May 2026) Iron Gate put a rewritten save system on the public test branch: "Worlds will no longer be saved with a .db and a .fwl file, but will instead be saved and stored in separate folders, with the .db file broken down into smaller pieces." Only the chunks that changed get written, and backups get folders of their own.

It has not shipped to the default branch — the live build is still 0.221.12 and everything above applies to it unchanged. If you are on the public test branch, copy the whole world folder instead of a file pair, and back up first: Iron Gate note the new system has not been tested with mods. Valheim leaves Early Access on 9 September 2026, so check which format your build uses before you migrate around that date.

What to Read Next

• Valheim Server Settings and Launch Arguments for the rest of the Startup tab, including the wipe procedure
• Managing your Valheim server for scheduled restarts and the backup routine that protects the world you just moved
• How to install mods for your Valheim server if your co-op group played modded — the server needs the same BepInEx setup

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