Troubleshooting Your Starbound Configuration File
While managing your Starbound server, you will more than likely end up editing the game's configuration file at some point. This contains information such as server accounts, passwords, banned user lists, and more.
If you do not edit this file correctly, Starbound will override it with the default configuration file settings when your server is turned on. This is meant to be a failsafe so that the server will still turn on even if you don't do something right.
Unfortunately that does not always work out. Let's take a look at how to troubleshoot configuration file problems more closely.
How do I know if my configs reset?
First, you'll want to open your Gameserverkings Manager Panel. Log in, and click the Game Services tab on the left-hand sidebar to navigate to your Starbound server. From there, click the Configuration Files button.
Now select the Text Editor option to the right side of the starbound_server.config file.
If your file has been reset, you will notice the following values:
"gameServerBind" : "::"
"queryServerBind" : "::"
"rconServerBind" : "::"
Normally, all three of these would list your server's IP instead of "::" as the value. This is the result of a bad configuraiton file being overwritten.
Troubleshooting the Configuration File
Not all is lost! You'll want to head back out of the text editor for the file and click on the File Manager button this time.
From here, navigate to the storage folder. Inside of this folder will be your configuration file, as well as one called starbound_server.config.old. Click the Download (Globe) icon to the right of the file name to download the file.
You'll now want to open up the file on your personal computer. You can do so with Notepad, or any other preferred text editor program. This file is in JSON format, and most of your errors are likely just formatting issues. An easy way to check for this is by using JSONLint. You can copy and paste the contents of the file into this website, and it will inform you of any errors.
Let's take a look at an example from my file that I intentionally damaged.
It has pointed out the specific line that has the problem. In this case, I removed a comma which broke the formatting and thus broke the file.
Once you've found your problem and resolved it (double check by running it through JSONLint again), you can copy the contents of the file, go back to your Configuration Files and Text Editor, and paste the contents in. Save them and restart your server. Your configurations should now be restored successfully.