Tuning Difficulty for a Full 16-Player Server
A full server is a very different fight from a duo. Sixteen players bring sixteen sets of cooldowns to every boss, and the default balance was not written for that. Enshrouded lets you retune all of it from enshrouded_server.json, without mods, and this guide covers what the settings actually are and what values they accept.
Start Here: Sixteen Is the Ceiling
- The maximum is 16.
slotCountaccepts a number between 1 and 16 and nothing above it. If you have read that communities run 24 or 32 slot Enshrouded servers, that is not a thing the game supports. - Difficulty is per world, not per player. There is no automatic scaling by group size. Whatever you set applies to everyone, so tune for the size of group you actually run.
- Nothing applies until the preset is Custom. This is the single most common reason a carefully tuned block does nothing at all. See below.
The Preset Gate
gameSettingsPreset takes one of five values:
Defaultis the balance the game shipped with and the recommendation for a first playthrough.Relaxedcuts enemy numbers and hands out more resources and loot. Aimed at base builders.Hardraises enemy numbers and makes them more aggressive.Survivalis Hard plus extra survival mechanics.Customis the only one that reads yourgameSettingsblock.
Set the preset to anything other than Custom and your whole gameSettings block is discarded. The server writes a line into its log saying the settings will not be applied because the preset is not set, which is how you confirm it.
Recommended Settings for a Sixteen-Player World
Every one of these is a real key, and every value below is inside the range the game accepts:
"gameSettingsPreset": "Custom",
"gameSettings": {
"enemyHealthFactor": 2.5,
"enemyDamageFactor": 1.5,
"bossHealthFactor": 2.5,
"bossDamageFactor": 1.5,
"enemyStaminaFactor": 1.5,
"threatBonus": 2,
"randomSpawnerAmount": "Many",
"aggroPoolAmount": "Many"
}
What Each One Does, and What It Will Accept
| Setting | Default | Range | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
enemyHealthFactor | 1 | 0.25 to 4 | Scales all non-boss enemy health. |
enemyDamageFactor | 1 | 0.25 to 5 | Scales all non-boss enemy damage. |
bossHealthFactor | 1 | 0.2 to 5 | Scales boss health. This is the one that stops a coordinated volley ending a fight early. |
bossDamageFactor | 1 | 0.2 to 5 | Scales the damage of boss attacks. |
enemyStaminaFactor | 1 | 0.5 to 2 | Raise it and enemies take longer to stun. This is the real answer to a full server stun-locking everything. |
enemyPerceptionRangeFactor | 1 | 0.5 to 2 | How far non-boss enemies see and hear. |
threatBonus | 1 | 0.25 to 4 | How often non-boss enemies attack. |
randomSpawnerAmount | Normal | Few, Normal, Many, Extreme | How many enemies exist in the world. |
aggroPoolAmount | Normal | Few, Normal, Many, Extreme | How many enemies may attack at once. On a full server this matters more than raw counts. |
pacifyAllEnemies | false | true, false | Enemies do not attack until attacked. Bosses are excluded. |
curseModifier | Normal | Easy, Normal, Hard | Shroud curse chance. Easy turns the feature off, Hard doubles the chance. |
Bosses are excluded from enemyDamageFactor, enemyHealthFactor, enemyStaminaFactor, enemyPerceptionRangeFactor, threatBonus and pacifyAllEnemies. Boss health and damage have their own two settings, which is why the block above sets both pairs.
Values Outside the Range
These ranges are not advice, they are the limits the game states. Two things happen when you leave them:
- A number outside its min and max is clamped or rejected rather than honoured.
- A word that is not in the option list fails to parse, and the server writes a line into the log naming the value it did not understand and listing the ones it supports. That log line is the fastest way to find a typo in this block.
Applying a Change
There is no hot reload and no console. Enshrouded has no admin command line, so a difficulty change means editing enshrouded_server.json and restarting the server. Stop the server before editing the file so your change is not overwritten when it shuts down.
Hardware
- CPU: more enemies means more work per tick, and this server is more sensitive to clock speed and performance-core count than to raw thread count. Its task system reports at startup that efficiency cores are disabled, so a high thread count on a hybrid desktop chip does not translate into server headroom.
- Watch, do not guess. The server writes a statistics line once a minute carrying the average tick cost and the live entity count. Raise
randomSpawnerAmountand watch what happens to both before you raise it again. See server overloaded.
Does loot scale with difficulty?
Not automatically. Loot has its own settings and they are independent of the enemy ones: resourceDropStackAmountFactor scales how much comes out of each stack in chests and drops, between 0.25 and 2. Raising enemy health does not raise rarity.
Is this for small groups?
No. For one to four players leave the factors at their defaults, or use the Hard preset if you want more pressure without hand-tuning anything.
Can I change difficulty on the fly?
No. There is no reload command, because there is no command console. Edit the file with the server stopped, then start it again.
Next Steps
- The full enshrouded_server.json configuration guide
- Config changes not applying
- Server overloaded: reading the tick stats
- Back to Enshrouded Wiki Home
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