Scheduling Automatic Server Restarts

1 Why schedule restarts at all

Game servers leak memory over time — Minecraft chunks pile up in RAM, Rust entity counts climb, modded servers hold onto unused references. A nightly restart clears all of that and gives you a clean tick rate at peak hours. It also lets your panel apply queued mod or config changes that need a reboot.

Good defaults:

• Minecraft (vanilla, Paper): daily restart at 5 AM your time
• Modded Minecraft (Forge, NeoForge, mod packs): twice daily — 5 AM and 5 PM
• Rust: daily restart, plus a forced restart on wipe day
• ARK: daily restart, ideally before your server's tribe-decay tick
• Schedule I, FiveM, Garry's Mod: every 12 hours works well for active servers

2 Create your first schedule

1. Open your server in the Solace panel.
2. Click the Schedules tab in the left sidebar.
3. Click New Schedule.
4. Fill in:
   • Name: something like "Daily Restart"
   • Minute: 0
   • Hour: 5 (or whatever low-traffic hour you want)
   • Day of month / Month / Day of week: leave as * for daily
   • Only when active: uncheck this — you want it to run even if the server is currently off
5. Click Create Schedule.

The schedule is now created but empty. Next, add a task to actually restart.

3 Add the restart task

1. Click your new schedule to open it.
2. Click New Task.
3. Set Action to Power Action.
4. Set Payload to restart.
5. Leave Time Offset at 0 for now.
6. Click Create Task.

That's it. At 5 AM each day the server will gracefully restart.

4 Add a 5-minute warning broadcast

Players hate getting kicked mid-fight. Add a chained task that broadcasts a warning before the restart:

1. Edit the same schedule and click New Task again.
2. Set Action to Send Command.
3. Set the Payload to a server message — examples by game:
   • Minecraft: say Server restarting in 5 minutes!
   • Rust (with RustAdmin/F1 console): say "Server restarting in 5 minutes"
   • ARK: broadcast Server restart in 5 minutes
4. Set Time Offset to 0 seconds (relative to schedule fire time).
5. Then change the restart task's offset to 300 (5 minutes after warning).

Now players see the warning at 4:55 AM and the actual restart fires at 5:00 AM.

5 Common patterns

Twice-daily restart (mod-heavy servers)

Create two schedules — one for 5 AM and one for 5 PM — both running the same restart task. Or use a single schedule with the cron Hour field set to 5,17.

Weekly maintenance restart with a 30-min lead

Create a schedule for Sunday 3:30 AM that broadcasts a 30-minute warning, then a second task at offset 1800 (30 minutes) that runs the restart.

Wipe day automation (Rust)

Schedule for the first Thursday of the month at 2 PM EST. Add tasks: send the wipe announcement command, run a backup, then trigger a restart. This is one of the more complex setups — open a ticket if you want help wiring it up.

6 Troubleshooting

The schedule says it ran but the server didn't restart

• Check that the Action on your task is Power Action, not Send Command. Send Command runs commands inside the running server; Power Action restarts the container.
• If Only when active was checked and the server was offline, the schedule skipped. Uncheck it.

Players didn't get the warning

• For Minecraft, make sure your command starts with say (without slash) — the panel injects commands directly into the server console where the leading / is implicit.
• For ARK and Rust, check that the broadcast command syntax matches your specific server build.