RuneScape: Dragonwilds World Settings Guide

World creation begins with Create World on the play screen, which takes you to the Wise Old Man's temple to make the decisions the world keeps for its lifetime. The first of those is how the world is reached, not how hard it is.

Choosing a type does not lock the audience on its own: whichever you pick, the world can still be limited to you, to your friends, or opened to the public. Friendly Fire is the switch that turns other players into valid targets, so the PvP decision is made here rather than in combat.

The name you type is capped at 16 characters, and the cap counts spaces and special characters such as -, ~, !, @ and _ even though those characters are stripped out. Keep the name short and alphanumeric if you plan to type it on a console or hand it to someone else, because it is the same name you will need when joining a hosted server.

Custom worlds are entered with a Custom World character. Creating one is part of the setup flow: the character is flagged as a custom-world character first, and the settings apply to the run from there.

The practical consequence is that Standard is a commitment. If you wanted a harder or softer world and picked Standard, the documented answer is a new world — Custom is the mode that lets a group change its mind on week three without losing the base everyone built.

Two of those rows are easy to misread. The drain row is about health, not about hunger in the abstract: on Normal the survival meters flatten out at 1% health instead of finishing you, while on Hard the same neglect ends the run. The gravestone row decides how much a bad night costs — on Hard the oldest grave is the one that pays for a repeated death.

Custom settings are split into a basic group and an advanced group, and the advanced group is where the world stops being a difficulty preset and becomes a rule set. The categories are:

Most scales follow the same shape: 1.0x by default, adjustable from 0.5x to 3.0x in 0.1x steps. The exceptions are worth knowing before you start sliding numbers around, because they are where a group can accidentally make a world unplayable or trivial:

Death rules come first. Retain Inventory on Death, Reset Last Completed XP Level on Death and Max Number of Gravestones per Player decide what a wipe costs. Leaving them at their defaults gives a Standard-feeling world; moving all three in the same direction is what separates a forgiving group world from a punishing one.

Then the survival clocks. Sustenance, hydration and endurance each have their own drain scale, and hunger and thirst have separate kill switches. Slow drains with kills off is a world where food is a buff rather than a timer; fast drains with kills on is a survival game in the harsher sense of the term.

Then the grind. XP Gain Scale sets the pace on its own, while All Crafting Recipes Unlocked and All Building Pieces Unlocked skip it for two specific activities. A group that wants to build a large base and would rather not spend the week on it can unlock building pieces and lower the building material cost instead of changing anything about combat.

Then the pressure from the world itself. Major and minor world event frequency has its own pair of scales, which is the lever that matters if the group wants a quiet build week or a map that keeps interrupting. And because every creature family has separate damage, health and resistance scales, the difficulty can be raised for one family — undead, or bosses — without touching the rest of the bestiary.

1. Create the world in game first

   Pick the world type, choose Custom, name it within the 16-character limit, then set the values you want on the Advanced tab before confirming.

2. Enter the world once with a custom-world character

   The save needs to exist before it can be uploaded.

3. Take the save file

   The worlds live in %userprofile%\AppData\Local\RSDragonwilds\Saved\SaveGames — copy the .sav you want to move.

4. Stop the hosted server, then upload

   In the host's file manager, open RSDragonwilds\Saved\SaveGames and drop the .sav in. Uploading over a running server is how saves get overwritten rather than replaced.

5. Rename the server to match the world

   On the host's startup settings, the server name has to be exactly the world name you typed at creation. Start the server afterwards and the custom rules come up with the world.

The order matters more than the individual clicks: stop, upload, rename, start. The flow above follows a host-published walkthrough of BisectHosting's panel, so the labels on your own host may differ even though the file paths are the game's rather than the host's.

Server-side configuration values are a separate layer of settings that sit alongside the world's own rules — those are covered on the dedicated server guide.

The pattern in that table is the reason a creature-family settings list keeps growing: new enemy groups arrive with their own scales rather than inheriting an older family's values. A world created before 0.10 will not have the undead and skeleton rows to set until the game writes them in.