Enshrouded leaves Early Access today. Keen Games ships version 1.0.0.0 on October 15, 2026 on PC and PlayStation 5, and published the full changelog a day early so nobody had to guess. Most of it is content: a new biome, a level cap of 50, nine new spell types and a logic system called Sparkworks. Tucked between the boss reworks are a handful of lines that change how a dedicated server behaves, and those are the ones this post is about.
Here is what is new, what happens to your existing world, and how to update a server without losing a week of building.
What's New in Enshrouded 1.0
The headline is that the whole map is finally open. North of the Veilwater Basin gates sits Cinder's Cradle, a two-layer biome: a lava wasteland of ruins below, and floating islands full of Ancient architecture and new guardians above. It carries 12 new Shroud Roots. The outer edges of the Springlands, Blackmire and Kindlewastes have been extended with new quests and another 6 Shroud Roots, and two new Hollow Halls open in the Albaneve Summits and the Veilwater Basin.
The rest of the big-ticket list:
- Level cap 50, with gear upgradable to level 55. A new Flame Level unlocks before Cinder's Cradle and raises the Flame Altar cap to 15.
- The story ends. The main quest wraps up the Ancients and the Shroud, with a final boss waiting in the sky.
- 14 new enemy types in the new faction, 37 new enemies in total once variants for the old factions are counted.
- Mages got the rework they needed: nine new spell types, eternal versions of every spell, upgradable eternal spells and arrows, and summonable skeletons through new Necromancy gems.
- A new "brick renderer" that keeps distant terrain and player builds detailed instead of collapsing them into blocks, plus HDR support.
Quality of life fills the rest: free-flying build mode, storage chests you can upgrade in place, nameable map markers and a larger loot pickup radius. Most former no-build zones are now buildable too.
The Lines That Matter on a Dedicated Server
Enemy scaling has an "Automatic" option. The server setting for how many enemies spawn per encounter gained a new value. On Automatic, the count scales with the size of the party actually fighting nearby. Players in another corner of Embervale do not count. For a 16-slot server where people split up, that is the most useful change in the patch: a solo player no longer faces a group-sized camp because four friends are online elsewhere.
The enemy damage slider was re-valued so the number reflects the damage players actually take. If you tuned enemy damage on a Custom preset in Early Access, the same number may now hit differently. Play a session and adjust.
Dedicated server passwords work as before. On player-hosted worlds, hosts now set one default permission password and promote or demote people in the social menu. On dedicated servers the user groups with their own passwords stay, and promoting or demoting in game is not possible. Admins also see a chat message when someone joins, showing that player's permission level.
Performance under load improved. Keen cut the memory used for server and client communication, made player movement more responsive while the server is struggling, and made gliding paths independent of server tick rate. The server performance warnings were reworked because they used to fire too early. There is also a new, very generous limit on factories per world, with a warning before you hit it.
Also worth knowing: updraft charge duration is now a world setting, and bosses regain health gradually after a party wipe instead of resetting instantly, which makes retries easier.
Cross-play is not in 1.0. Keen says it is being worked on, with no date, so PC and PS5 players still cannot share a server.
What Happens to Your Early Access World
Your world survives. Enshrouded 1.0 introduces a new save format with smaller files and a simpler folder layout. When the game finds a save from version 0.8 or earlier, it backs it up first and then migrates it automatically.
Two catches:
- Every character's skill tree is reset the first time they play on 1.0. Skill points come back to spend again, so tell your players before they log in and panic.
- Keen recommends starting fresh. The early regions were reworked: new chests, new roads, reworked camps and a new pace for the first hours. A migrated world keeps your bases but misses some of that, and the Flame Altars you placed sit in a world that has changed around them.
We covered that decision before launch in Will Enshrouded 1.0 Wipe Your Save?. Short version: keep the old world if your group loves its builds, start fresh if most players are new.
How to Update Your Enshrouded Server to 1.0
On a DoomHosting Enshrouded server, Auto Update is on by default, so a restart pulls the 1.0 build from SteamCMD. Do it in this order:
- Take a manual backup in the panel's Backups tab. The game makes its own copy before migrating, but a panel backup is a full snapshot you can restore with one click if anything goes wrong.
- Restart the server and watch the console until it finishes updating and loading the world. The first boot on 1.0 can take longer than usual while the save migrates.
- Make sure players update too. A client on the old build cannot join a 1.0 server, so anyone getting a version error needs to restart Steam.
- Check your settings preset. Enshrouded only reads the custom values in
enshrouded_server.jsonwhengameSettingsPresetis set toCustom. On Default, Relaxed, Hard or Survival, every tweak is silently ignored, including the new Automatic enemy scaling.
One warning from our own testing: when we booted test servers with every setting at its extremes, a single misspelled value (a made-up option name) kept the server offline with no log written at all. Do not hand-type the new Automatic value into the JSON until you know the exact spelling the 1.0 server accepts. Our Enshrouded server settings generator and the panel's Config tab only offer values we have booted.
Passwords for the four user groups are set from the Startup tab on our servers, because the panel rewrites those fields from startup variables on every boot. Editing them in the JSON does nothing.
Sparkworks and What Comes Next
The feature most likely to keep a server busy after the story ends is Sparkworks, a logic system that wires inputs like levers and pressure plates to outputs like doors, traps and enemy spawns. Keen pitches it for puzzle dungeons, parkour courses and arenas, shared through the adventure sharing browser. A shared server is the natural place to build one together.
Keen calls 1.0 the end of the story "for now". Expect patches in the coming weeks as a much larger player base finds the bugs Early Access missed. If you want to know how we got here, our Enshrouded 1.0 release date post covers the road to launch.
Run Your Enshrouded 1.0 Server with DoomHosting
DoomHosting runs Enshrouded servers on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with auto-updates on restart, one-click panel backups, a Config tab for world settings, full FTP access, DDoS protection and 24/7 support. Back up, restart, and go see Cinder's Cradle with your group.
