Specify Persistent Universe

I have a VPS server up an running but each time I restart the starbound server it creates a new universe file. I know they live in the "universe" directory, but is there a way to tell starbound server to use an existing universe on launch instead of creating a new one?

 

Yep,

in the default_configuration.config


"useDefaultWorldCoordinate" : false,
"defaultWorldCoordinate" : "alpha:-XXXXXXXX:-XXXXXXXX:-XXXXXXXX:6:12",

you would want to set it to true and specify the world file name from your universe folder.

 

I actually think the server just loads whatever world is in the universe folder. All of the world files in the universe folder are part of the same in game universe I believe. If you delete that folder and reboot the server it will generate a new universe folder and totally new universe in game.

 

In my experience it can use the same world file, or it can generate a new world to use, it seems to do as it pleases.

 

I have consistently noticed that every time you restart the server it generates a new world. The old world is there, but for whatever reason it just sends everyone to the new world it creates. Presumably, the coordinates of the world can be determined from the file name and entered into the game client to travel to a previously generated world.

I'm a bit unclear as to what the behavior of the defaultWorldCoordinate setting does, so I'm leery to change it on my server. Does it make all clients that connect every time go to that world, or only clients logging in for the first time? Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to play as much as the people actually using my server, so I'm not sure what the normal behavior is anyways. Does it remember where you logged out and put you back there when you log in?

Edit - it puts you back where you were, but it seems that for the starter world to "stick" you have to do something. I'm not sure what the trigger is, but I bet it's finishing a quest or something. I updated my existing server today and it put me back at the world I should have been at, so I went ahead and made our "starter world" the default world in the config. I did notice though that when I spun up a different instance of the server for testing, it would just generate a new world, but I didn't do much in it. I tried picking up and moving blocks, but that didn't matter. If I have time later I will test it, but for now I think it's best to note the world generated at first and put it in your config file.