How to schedule 7 Days to Die server restarts (and never restart on blood moon)

Your 7 Days to Die server gets slower the longer it runs, and a plain timed restart can land right in the middle of horde night, because a scheduler only knows the clock on the wall, not the game day. RCON Hub fixes it: its 7DTD Manager restarts your server on a schedule, saves first, warns players in game, and moves any restart that would hit a blood moon to just after it.

Why restarts are a headache on 7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die slowly uses more memory the longer it runs. Leave it up for days and players start complaining about lag. A daily restart keeps it smooth.

But a restart at a fixed time doesn't know what's happening in the game. The horde comes every 7 days by default, and your SandboxCode can change that. Kill the server at 22:00 game time on horde night and you've wrecked the best fight of the week.

So the manual fix looks like this:

• Keep an eye on the game day and work out when the next blood moon falls.
• Type saveworld and shutdown over telnet, then start the server again.
• Skip the restart on horde nights, and remember to do it later.

It works until the night you forget.

What the game and other tools leave out

• Schedulers don't know about horde night. Hosting panels and scheduled scripts restart at a fixed real time, and the game clock stops while nobody's on. 7DTD Manager asks the game for the next horde day and holds restarts, updates, scheduled backups and wipes until it's over. The Server page says when something was moved.
• The blood moon setting is hidden. How often the horde comes now lives inside the encoded SandboxCode, and the game's own setting value can be stale. 7DTD Manager reads the next horde day from the game itself and decodes the SandboxCode.
• Closing the server loses progress. Closing its window skips the save, and the day count can reset. 7DTD Manager's stop sends saveworld, then shutdown, and only ends the process if that fails.
• A timer can't see memory grow. 7DTD Manager also restarts on low FPS, high memory or too many entities, read from the server's stats line.
• A crash stays down. The game doesn't start itself again. 7DTD Manager restarts it after a crash, three times in ten minutes at most.

How RCON Hub fixes it

On your own PC, 7DTD Manager also gives you:

• Daily restarts at up to six times a day, with a countdown in game chat.
• Quiet hours around horde night, in game time, that you set yourself.
• A backup first, and a restart straight away when nobody's on.

Step-by-step setup

1. Install RCON Hub. Download it from rconhub.gg and run the installer. It's free for Windows 10 and 11.
2. Add the 7 Days to Die game pack. Open RCON Hub. On Your games, click Add game, pick 7 Days to Die and click Install.
3. Add your server. On the Servers page, click Add a server on this PC. Then, on the Server page, click Install it for me to download the free dedicated server with SteamCMD (over 10 GB), and click Start server.
4. Set your restart times. Open the Automation page. Under Restarts and backups, add a time to Restart every day at (this PC's time) and click Add. Choose how long to Warn players before each restart.
5. Pick the extras. Tick Restart straight away when nobody's on (no countdown needed) and Back up the save before each restart. Tick Update automatically when Steam has a new build too, if you like.
6. Restart when it struggles. Under Restart when it struggles, set the FPS and memory limits, set Wait at least a number of minutes between automatic restarts, and click Save.
7. Check the quiet hours. Open the Blood moon page. Under Quiet hours around horde night, set Game hours before 22:00 and Game hours after 04:00, then click Save. The page shows the next quiet window in your PC's time.

Scheduled restarts, updates and backups are for servers on your own PC. A rented server's host looks after its own schedule.

Is it safe?

Yes.

• It runs locally. RCON Hub and 7DTD Manager run on your own Windows PC. The server's console (telnet) gets a new password every start, and 7DTD Manager reaches it on this PC.
• No injection. RCON Hub never touches the game client or your players' games. There's nothing for anti-cheat to flag, so it won't get anyone banned.
• Your secrets stay put. Tokens and passwords are stored encrypted on your PC and never shown again.

It's beta software. Back up your server's settings and data before you change things.

Let the horde come, not the restart

Restart while everyone's asleep, not while they're on the roof. Download RCON Hub, add the 7 Days to Die pack, and let it pick the right time.

Download RCON Hub 0.3.13 More guides