Romestead Console Commands Cheat Sheet: kick, ban, say, save, and Every Admin Command

Romestead’s dedicated server accepts admin commands on standard input — no RCON daemon, no external client, no remote console protocol. If you’ve got console access to the running server (the panel Console tab on managed hosting, or an attached screen session on a self-hosted box), you can run any of the commands below by typing and pressing Enter.

This is the complete reference, drawn from the official Beartwigs Docker setup that ships with the dedicated server tool.

Player Management

Notes on Banning

Romestead’s ban appears to be name-based, not Steam-ID-based, in the current EA build. That means a determined troll can change their display name and rejoin. If someone keeps coming back, combine ban with a server password rotation — change the Password in your config and only share the new one with trusted players.

Communication

Use say for: announcing restarts, reminding players about server rules, calling people back to the settlement before nightfall, or just being a benevolent admin.

Example:

say Server restart in 5 minutes! Save your progress.

World Persistence

Run save before any risky operation: applying a patch, letting an unknown player in, testing config changes. Combined with panel backups, this is your defence against losing progress.

Shutdown

Auto-shutdown: when you click Stop from a managed panel (or send SIGTERM to the dotnet process), the server automatically receives stop and waits up to 30 seconds for the save to complete before being force-killed. You don’t normally need to type stop yourself.

Cheat Mode

Romestead has a server-wide cheat toggle via config.json:

"EnableCheats": true

With this on, cheat commands are available to everyone connected — not just admins. This is fine for test worlds or sandbox-mode “creative” servers, but you almost certainly do not want it on your main co-op world.

Beartwigs has not yet shipped a per-Steam-ID admin allowlist or a “give me cheats but not other players” mechanism. If that’s important to you, it’s worth watching the EA roadmap.

What Romestead Doesn’t Have (Yet)

Worth knowing what isn’t in the command set, so you don’t waste time looking:

• No in-game teleport or coordinate commands documented
• No spawn-item / give-resource commands without EnableCheats
• No /op or /admin command to promote a player to admin status
• No remote RCON over a network port — stdin is the entire admin API
• No mod loader integration; mods aren’t a thing in Romestead at this point

Beartwigs has been clear that they expect Romestead to be in Early Access for 1-2 years. More admin tooling is realistic to expect through that window.

How to Run These Commands

On Managed Hosting

Open your server in the panel, click the Console tab, type the command in the input at the bottom, press Enter. The command output appears in the same console feed.

On Self-Hosted (Linux + screen)

Attach to the screen session and type:

screen -r romestead
# you're now attached to the running server
list
# (press Ctrl+A then D to detach)

On Docker

The Beartwigs reference Docker uses a FIFO at /tmp/romestead-stdin. Send a command with:

docker exec -i romestead bash -c 'echo "list" > /tmp/romestead-stdin'

Print This and Stick It on Your Monitor

The whole admin command surface area for Romestead today is about 10 commands. That’s deliberately small for an Early Access game, and it covers the moves you’ll actually make 99% of the time as a server admin: list, kick, ban, say, save, stop. The rest of admin work happens at the config file layer and the panel layer — see our config.json reference and the admin setup guide for the broader picture.