How to roll back your Terraria world with rollback copies

Terraria keeps older copies of your world next to it, as .wld.bak, .wld.bak2 and so on, refreshed on every save. On Terraria Vanilla the World rollback copies setting decides how many. To roll back, stop the server, set the current world file aside and rename a .bak copy to the world's name. For anything older, restore a panel backup.

How many copies

On Terraria Vanilla, open Settings, Game Settings and set World rollback copies, from 0 to 9. The default is 2. The panel calls them cheap insurance against a corrupted save, separate from the panel's backups. Restart after a change.

Each copy is one save older than the one before it. With autosave and the save before every nightly backup, the copies can be minutes or hours apart, not days.

Roll back to a copy

1. Stop the server.
2. Open the Files tab and go to saves, then Worlds.
3. Open the ... menu on your world, for example world.wld, choose Rename file, and rename it to world-broken.wld. This keeps it in case you want it back.
4. Rename world.wld.bak to world.wld. For an older copy, use world.wld.bak2 instead.
5. Start the server. It loads the older copy.

Take a panel backup first if you are not sure: How to back up and restore your Terraria world.

TShock's own world backups

TShock can copy the world into tshock/backups every few minutes. On the config.json page in Config files of the Settings tab:

• TShock world backups every (minutes): how often. 0 turns it off. They use disk space.
• Keep TShock world backups for (minutes): older copies are deleted after this long.

To use one, stop the server, rename your current world file in saves/Worlds to keep it aside, then use Move file on the copy in tshock/backups to move it into saves/Worlds, and Rename file to give it your world's file name. Start the server. See How to change TShock settings on your Terraria server.

Good to know

• The .bak copies are made by the game, not the panel. Panel backups on the Backups page are kept separately and can go back further.
• A world that will not load at all may be from a newer game version rather than damaged: Your Terraria server stops because the world is from a newer version.