How to restart your Vintage Story server on a schedule

To restart a Vintage Story server on a schedule on PlayNHost, open Quick Tasks, choose Schedule… in the menu of Send Restart, and set it to repeat every day at the time you want. A second schedule with Announce to Players, five minutes earlier, warns players in chat. Each restart also installs a waiting patch update when Auto-update server is on.

How do I schedule a daily restart?

1. Open your server in the panel and click Quick Tasks in the left menu.
2. Under All tasks, open the menu of Send Restart ("Gracefully restarts the server container.") and choose Schedule….
3. The Schedule task window opens on Arguments. Send Restart needs nothing filled in. Give the schedule a name, for example Daily restart, and click Next step.
4. On Time, choose Repeats, then Every day, and pick the time under At, for example 06:00. If your time zone differs from the panel's, the window also shows that time where you are.
5. Leave Enabled on and click Schedule. The new schedule appears under Schedules.

The panel stops Vintage Story with the game's own /stop command, then starts it again. To be sure the world is written first, schedule Save World (/autosavenow) a minute before the restart, the same way.

How do I warn players before the restart?

1. Under All tasks, open the menu of Announce to Players and choose Schedule….
2. Type the Message, for example Restarting in 5 minutes, and a name such as Restart warning. Click Next step.
3. Choose Repeats, Every day, and a time five minutes before the restart, for example 05:55.
4. Click Schedule.

At 05:55 every player sees the message, sent with /announce, and at 06:00 the server restarts.

What does the Automatic backup schedule do?

When your plan has backup slots, every Vintage Story server has a ready-made Automatic backup schedule under Schedules. Every night it runs two steps: /autosavenow to write the world to disk, then, 30 seconds after the schedule starts, a full backup. When your backup slots are full, the oldest automatic backup makes room for the newest. You do not need to set anything up. See How to back up and restore your Vintage Story world.

What can I change later?

Each schedule card has a switch to turn it off, and a menu with Edit schedule…, Run now and Delete schedule. The time of an existing schedule cannot be changed: for another time, make a new schedule and delete or switch off the old one, for both the restart and its warning.

Skip while players are online does not help on Vintage Story: the server does not report its players to the panel, and when the panel cannot tell, the run goes ahead. Pick a time when few people play instead.

The general guide: How to schedule tasks and automatic backups. Other Console commands you can schedule with Send Command: How to use the Console and commands on your Vintage Story server.