Data Files

With the default JSON storage, data is stored in <Project>/Saved/ServerCore. On a packaged server that is <ServerFolder>/<ProjectName>/Saved/ServerCore.

Change the location with Data Directory in the settings, or per server with:

MyGameServer -log -ServerCoreDataDir=/srv/mygame/servercore

Relative paths are relative to the project folder.

File	Content
Bans.json	Bans
Mutes.json	Mutes
Whitelist.json	Whitelist state and entries
Groups.json	Permission groups
Players.json	Every player that has joined: names, group, play time, last IP
Notes.json	Staff notes
Logs/AdminLog-YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl	Admin logs, one JSON object per line, one file per day (UTC)

Format

Every file has the same envelope:

{
  "Version": 1,
  "SavedUtc": "2026-10-12T19:04:11.000Z",
  "Data": { }
}

Data is the matching field of FServerCoreDatabase, serialized with Unreal's JSON object converter.

Editing files by hand

You can edit the files while the server is stopped. To edit while it is running, edit the file and run /reload (unsaved runtime changes are lost).

Safety

• Files are written to a .tmp file first and then moved into place, so a crash never leaves a half-written file.
• If a file can't be parsed, it is copied to <File>.corrupt-<timestamp> and an error is logged, so nothing is lost.

Backups

Back up the whole ServerCore folder. It is small and plain text.