There is a moment on every new Conan Exiles server where somebody asks why everything is taking so long, and the honest answer is usually that nobody touched the settings. Funcom ships the dedicated server with official-server values, tuned for a few thousand strangers grinding in parallel. You have six friends with jobs. The gap between a server people quit after a week and one they still play a year later lives almost entirely in the numbers below.
This is not the setup walkthrough. If you still need a server running, start with our full Conan Exiles Enhanced setup guide and come back. This is what each setting actually does, which ones quietly fight each other, and three presets you can paste tonight.
Where the settings actually live
Two places, and they do not always agree.
The in-game admin panel (log in, enter the admin password, open Settings) writes changes to the running server immediately. It is the right tool for nudging a multiplier mid-session.
ServerSettings.ini is the file of record. You will find it at ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ServerSettings.ini, reachable through your host's file manager or over FTP. A Linux-native build swaps WindowsServer for LinuxServer.
Here is the trap that eats an afternoon: Conan Exiles writes its in-memory settings back out to ServerSettings.ini when the server shuts down. Edit that file while the server is running and the next shutdown overwrites every line you typed. Stop the server, edit, then start it again. Always in that order.
If you have not set an admin password yet, nothing above is available to you. That takes about two minutes.
The multipliers that actually change how the server feels
Four settings do most of the work, and one of them is a trap.
HarvestAmountMultiplier is what everyone reaches for first. Official servers run 1.0. On a private server, 2.0 to 3.0 is the sweet spot: you still take gathering trips, you just do not spend an entire evening on one. Past 5.0 the building game stops being a game, because one afternoon fills every chest you own and nothing you build after that costs you anything.
PlayerXPRateMultiplier is a global multiplier, and four more stack on top of it: Kill, Harvest, Craft, and Time. That last one is where people go wrong. PlayerXPTimeMultiplier is passive experience that trickles in simply for being logged in. Raise the global rate and the time multiplier together and your players reach level 60 while standing in a river, which deletes the entire progression arc in a weekend. For a group that has beaten the game before, 2.0 global with the sub-multipliers left at 1.0 feels right. For a first-time group, 1.5.
Now the important one. Read the noun in the setting name before you touch any crafting speed.
ItemConvertionMultiplier (yes, Funcom misspelled it, and yes it is still spelled that way) is a speed multiplier. Higher means faster furnaces and faster wheels of pain.
ThrallCraftingTimeMultiplier is a time multiplier. Lower means faster thralls.
Set them both to 2.0 because they sound similar and you have just doubled your furnace speed and doubled how long your thralls take. This is the most common misconfiguration on private Conan servers, and it is invisible until somebody complains that their armorer feels broken.
PvP, raiding, and the two windows people confuse
Conan Exiles has two separate time windows. They are not the same setting and mixing them up is how servers die.
RestrictPVPTime, with PVPTimeStart and PVPTimeEnd, controls when players can hurt players. This is the PvE-Conflict format: friendly all day, fangs out from 20:00 to 23:00.
RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime, with PVPBuildingDamageTimeStart and PVPBuildingDamageTimeEnd, controls when players can hurt buildings. This is the raid window, and it decides whether your server survives contact with real people.
The reason to keep them separate is simple arithmetic. Getting killed costs you a corpse run. Getting raided while you sleep costs you forty hours. A three-hour raid window placed on an evening when people are genuinely online turns raiding into an event everyone shows up for, instead of a reason to uninstall.
If you want combat but no demolition at all, set CanDamagePlayerOwnedStructures to False and leave the PvP window open. Duels, no bulldozers.
While you are in this section, find AvatarsDisabled. Avatars are a god-tier delete-a-base button. On a server with fewer than twenty players, turn them off and do not think about it again.
Purge and decay, the two settings that kill servers quietly
PurgeLevel runs from 0 to 6 and scales what comes for you. But the reason most private servers never see a Purge is not the level. The purge meter fills from player activity, and then RestrictPurgeTime and its window hold it back. On a six-player server where everybody plays two evenings a week, that meter barely moves. If you want Purges to be a real part of your server, widen the restriction window and shorten PurgeDelay. Leave PurgePreparationTime generous: it is your warning siren, and setting it near zero means people log in to rubble and no story about how it happened.
Decay is the other silent killer. EnableBuildingDecay combined with a low BuildingDecayTimeMultiplier will cheerfully delete the base of anyone who takes a two-week holiday. On a friends-and-family server, raise the multiplier substantially or set DisableBuildingAbandonment to True. On a public server, do the opposite and leave decay on, or your map fills with abandoned foundation spam inside a month.
Three presets you can copy tonight
| Setting | Chill co-op PvE | PvE-Conflict | Competitive PvP |
|---|---|---|---|
| HarvestAmountMultiplier | 3.0 | 2.0 | 1.5 |
| PlayerXPRateMultiplier | 2.0 | 1.5 | 1.0 |
| ItemConvertionMultiplier | 2.0 | 1.5 | 1.0 |
| ThrallCraftingTimeMultiplier | 0.5 | 0.75 | 1.0 |
| PVPEnabled | False | True | True |
| RestrictPVPTime | n/a | True, 20:00-23:00 | False |
| CanDamagePlayerOwnedStructures | False | True | True |
| RestrictPVPBuildingDamageTime | n/a | True, 20:00-23:00 | True, 18:00-23:00 |
| AvatarsDisabled | True | True | False |
| PurgeLevel | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| DisableBuildingAbandonment | True | True | False |
Change one column at a time, then play a session before you touch anything else. A server where nobody can explain why gathering feels strange is a server where four multipliers moved at once.
Apply, restart, verify
Stop the server. Edit ServerSettings.ini. Start it again. Log in and confirm the values stuck in the admin panel, because a typo in an ini key does not throw an error, it just silently reverts to default.
If the server does not reappear in the browser afterwards, check it with the Conan Exiles server status checker before you start rewriting config. The usual culprit is a port or a mod, not a setting.
Speaking of mods: settings and mods interact, and mods win. Anything that adds its own harvesting, thrall, or building system will happily ignore your multipliers. Our server-side Workshop picks flag which ones do that.
Still sizing hardware? The Conan Exiles RAM calculator turns a player count and a mod load into an actual number. And if you would rather skip the file-manager archaeology entirely, our Conan Exiles hosting hands you a server with the config already in reach, full FTP access, and one-click Workshop installs.
