How to Download the Savegame of Your Terraria tShock Server

You can download your server's world to your PC at any time – for example as an additional backup, to archive it, or to move it to another server. tShock uses the regular Terraria world format: the entire world is contained in a single .wld file.

Caution

Stop your server before downloading the file. When you stop it via the dashboard, tShock saves the world cleanly. If you download the file while the server is running, you may end up with an incomplete state.

Download the world

1. Stop the server
   Stop your server via the dashboard.

2. Connect via SFTP
   Connect to your server via SFTP.

3. Open the main directory
   The world file is located directly in the main directory of your server:

   /

4. Download the world
   Download the .wld file of your world to your PC.

5. Start the server
   Start your server again.

Which file is the right one?

You can tell which world is loaded from the World Name field in the Settings of the dashboard. If it contains MyWorld, for example, you need the file MyWorld.wld.

Other data that belongs to your savegame

Path	Content
/<World Name>.wld	The world itself – terrain, buildings, chests, NPCs
/tshock/tshock.sqlite	Accounts, groups, bans and – with Server Side Characters enabled – the character data of your players
/tshock/config.json	The tShock server settings
/tshock/backups/	The automatic world backups created by tShock

Server Side Characters

If Server Side Characters are enabled (the Enabled value in /tshock/sscconfig.json), the inventories and progress of your players are not stored in the .wld file but in /tshock/tshock.sqlite. In that case download both files, otherwise the characters will be missing.

tShock backup files

tShock additionally stores its own backups at regular intervals in the folder /tshock/backups/. The file name consists of the world name, the .wld extension and a timestamp, e.g. MyWorld.wld.2026-07-30T12.00.00Z.bak. Older backups are deleted automatically after a configured time – so download important states in good time.

Continue playing locally

Copy the downloaded .wld file to %userprofile%\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds on your PC to open the world in single player. On Linux the folder is ~/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds, on macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Terraria/Worlds.

Restoring the world

If you want to transfer the world back to a server later, follow the guide Add savegame.

Regular backups

For automatic or regular backups you can also use the backup function: Create backup.