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Sons of the Forest Server Restart Guide

Sons of the Forest Guide • Updated Aug 29, 2026

How to Schedule Sons of the Forest Server Restarts

Scheduled restarts can help with maintenance, updates, and crash recovery, but they cannot repair a bad save or an overloaded host. Sons of the Forest has no documented RCON interface, so use the restart action provided by your control panel or service manager rather than copying RCON warning commands from another game.

Before scheduling anything

  • Choose a quiet time and tell players when the world will be unavailable.
  • Confirm the service starts with the correct -userdatapath and StartSOTFDedicated.bat or provider entrypoint.
  • Take an independent backup of the SonsOfTheForestDS data directory.
  • Test one manual stop/start cycle and verify the world loads afterward.

Managed hosting panel

Use the panel's documented restart or scheduled-task feature. Prefer a graceful stop, wait for the process to exit, and then start it again. Confirm that the schedule applies to the correct server and timezone. If the panel only offers a hard kill, lower the risk with a recent backup and a maintenance window; do not describe it as a graceful save.

Linux service manager

If your provider explicitly supports a Linux service wrapper, schedule the wrapper's restart command with systemd or the provider's scheduler. The service definition must identify the working directory, executable, user-data path, and log location. Linux binaries and launch wrappers vary by distribution, so do not paste a Windows batch file or an undocumented executable name into a generic unit.

# Inspect the service before enabling a schedule
systemctl status sotf.service
systemctl restart sotf.service
journalctl -u sotf.service --since "15 minutes ago"

Windows Task Scheduler

Schedule the provider's or your own tested start wrapper after documenting how it stops the current process. A wrapper that simply kills SonsOfTheForestDS.exe can interrupt a save. If you cannot verify a graceful stop, use the hosting panel or perform a manual maintenance restart instead.

Crash recovery

  1. Check the process log and available disk space before restarting repeatedly.
  2. Confirm the server and clients are on compatible builds.
  3. Check the three UDP ports and provider health if every player disconnects.
  4. Restore a pre-incident save only after preserving the current data directory.
  5. Escalate to the provider when the process repeatedly exits with no configuration change.

Useful related guides

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