Dragonwilds, Two Weeks After 1.0: What Hosting It Taught Us

Fluxers! RuneScape: Dragonwilds left early access two weeks ago, and they have been the busiest two weeks the games hub has had. The Dragonwilds section is not yet three weeks old, and it is already the most deployed game there.

Here is what those two weeks taught us about this game, and what we built because of it. If you just want a server, RuneScape: Dragonwilds server hosting on Flux starts at $5.49 a month.

Four players, or six

Jagex markets Dragonwilds as a game for one to four players, and that is what a world hosted from inside the game holds. A dedicated server holds six. It is the same game and the same world, with two more seats and one larger difference: the world stays up when the person who started it logs off.

Six is the ceiling of the game, and no host can sell a seventh seat. What a host can do is sell the six in pieces, as a "2 slot" or "4 slot" server. We do not. Every plan runs the full six, and the plans differ only in memory, by the rule the server itself documents: 2 GB, plus 1 GB per player.

• Dragonwilds 4GB, $5.49 a month, comfortable for two players
• Dragonwilds 6GB, $7.49 a month, for four
• Dragonwilds 8GB, $8.99 a month, for a full world of six

The full breakdown, ports included, is on the Dragonwilds dedicated server requirements page.

The question every new owner asked

"Where is the PvP switch?" There is none. In Dragonwilds the rules of a world, its type, its difficulty and whether players can hurt each other, are chosen on the create world screen and saved inside the world. The dedicated server never shows that screen. Its configuration covers the owner, two passwords and two names, and nothing else.

The usual answer is to build a world on your PC with the rules you want and upload it. That works, and it is slow. So the dashboard now has a World Settings tab that reads the rules of the world your group is already playing and lets you change them in place: Standard, Hard, Custom or Creative, PvP on or off, and every rule of a Custom world. It can also start a new world of any type. It is marked beta, and it asks you to take a backup first. What it can and cannot do is on the Dragonwilds world settings editor page.

One thing we learned the hard way, from a support ticket: a Dragonwilds character is made for one kind of world. Standard and Hard worlds share characters. Custom and Creative worlds need their own. Move a Standard world to Custom and the group keeps every base and every chest, but plays it with new characters. The old ones are not deleted. They stay on each player's PC and come back when the world goes back. The tab now says so before it saves.

Bringing a world you already have

Most groups arrive with a world they have been playing for months and do not want to start over. A Dragonwilds world is one save file, and a server runs it exactly as it was left. The one rule is that the server loads a world by the name saved inside it, so the server's world name has to match before the upload. The dashboard checks that and refuses a mismatch before it touches anything.

Players on the Xbox app or PC Game Pass have no save file to find, because that version keeps its worlds in a different format. The dashboard reads that folder and converts the world for you. Every step is in the guide on how to move a Dragonwilds world to a dedicated server.

"My server is not showing up"

Dragonwilds has no server list and no address to paste. Players open the Worlds screen, go to the Public tab and search for the world by name, and the search is case sensitive. Almost every "server not showing up" report we saw came down to one of two things: a name typed with different capitals, or a first boot that had not finished. The first start downloads the whole game from Steam and takes ten to twenty minutes, and until it ends there is nothing to find.

If you run your own server, the third cause is the port. Dragonwilds uses a single UDP port, and the number has to be the same inside and outside. The host side of all of this is in our guide to a Dragonwilds server not showing up, and the full self-hosting walkthrough is in how to set up a Dragonwilds dedicated server.

What runs underneath

A Dragonwilds server on Flux is a Flux Cloud application like any other. It runs as two copies on separate nodes, one live and one on standby with the world synced, so the machine under your world is not a single point of failure. You choose the region when you deploy, the plan reserves its own CPU and memory, and the port is opened for you with the same number on both sides.

Since 1.0 the game is on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2, and every server here runs its world with crossplay on.

The first week is free for new Flux accounts, with no card, and the first paid month has a 30 day money back guarantee. Pick a plan, paste your Player ID, name the world: runonflux.com/games/dragonwilds.