Launch Options

Launch options can be added to Unturned to change certain game settings before running the game. This allows for recovering from certain problems (such as an unwanted resolution or UI scale), troubleshooting a wide range of issues, or toggling settings not available from in-game.

This article lists the launch options available for Unturned. You can add launch options through your Steam Library.

  1. Right-click Unturned in your Steam Library.

  2. Select the Properties… button.

  3. On the General tab, find the Launch Options field near the bottom.

  4. Type options separated by spaces. For example, -TimeOverlay -Width=1920 -Height=1080 will enable the TimeOverlay flag, set Width to 1920, and set Height to 1080.

Game Options

Some of the launch options are primarily intended for use with the Unturned Dedicated Server tool.

+connect: Connect to a server, in the format of +connect <ip address>:<port>.

-Cinematic: Turns off many level-of-detail optimizations. This has a significant performance cost.

Effects include:

  • 4 km draw distance and sun shadow range.

  • LOD groups always show their highest quality. (High LOD bias.)

  • Lights are always visible. (Turns off light LODs.)

  • Objects and resources are always visible. (No landmarks or culling volumes.)

  • Terrains always use splatmap shaders. (No basemap fallback texture.)

  • Terrains always use max-quality heightmaps. (No mesh simplification.)

  • Sun shadowmaps use GPU max supported resolution. (16,384 x 16,384 on some modern GPUs.)

  • Planar reflections render at 100% resolution. (Rather than 50%.)

-DisableCullingVolumes: Disable object culling distance overrides. Please refer to Manual Object Culling for more details.

-DisableLightLODs: Disable fadeout of dynamic lights. Could be useful for high-quality screenshots.

-FullscreenMode=: Window mode override.

-FallbackGizmos: Use 3D Unity line renderer component for debug visualization rather than pixel-perfect lines. Performance with these is lower than the default, so only intended for cases where the default is unimplemented.

-FarClipDistance float: [16.0, 2048.0] overrides the maximum draw distance in the graphics menu. By default the lowest max draw distance is 614.4 meters which is slightly higher than the network distance of 512.0 meters. Useful for players who are willing to gain performance at a significant gameplay disadvantage.

-ForceTrustClient: Disables movement validation (e.g., position difference between ticks matches speed) for vehicles. Using this is not recommended! It is easier for cheaters to fly cars with movement limits disabled. This flag should eventually be removed when(/if) vehicle movement is made server authoritative.

-FrameRateLimit= int: Overrides the frame rate limit specified in the display menu. Negative values disable the limit. Useful if game is running at thousands of FPS on the loading screen and overheats.

-GameSense: GameSense integration.

-Glazier= enum (IMGUI, UIToolkit): Use a different UI system instead of the default uGUI. Accepted values are IMGUI (legacy) and UIToolkit (experimental). For more information, refer to: Glazier.

-h int: Alias of -height.

-height int: Override in-game resolution height.

-Holiday= enum (AprilFools, Christmas, Halloween, HW, PrideMonth, Valentines, XMAS, LunarNewYear, LNY): Override the active holiday.

-HostPlayerLimit= int: Clamps max number of players to this number. Useful for hosting providers.

-LegacyConsole: Use the legacy console rather than the default threaded console.

-LogAssemblyResolve: Log when the resolution of an assembly fails. Useful when working with non-Rocket plugins.

-LogBadMessages: Log when the game ignores a network message, including from whom. This is only recommended if trying to narrow down whether a connection is trying to waste time on the game thread by potentially exploiting something. By default the server automatically disconnects clients that are sending invalid messages, whereas the instances logged by this option could potentially be false positives.

-LogBallisticDropConversion: Log automatic change of older gun assets’ Ballistic_Drop property to Bullet_Gravity_Multiplier. Useful when manually updating older guns to the new property.

-LogGunSpreadConversion: Log automatic change of older gun assets’ Spread_Hip property to Spread_Angle_Degrees. Useful when manually updating older guns to the new property.

-LogLevelBatchingTextureAtlasExclusions: Please refer to Level Batching for more details.

-LogSpawnTablesAfterLoadingLevel: Log all spawn chances.

-LogVehicleWheelConfigurations: Log automatic creation of vehicle asset’s WheelConfigurations property for older vehicles. Useful when converting vehicles to the new format.

-ModulesPath string: If set, search for .dll and .module files in this directory instead of in Unturned/Modules.

-NetTransport= enum (SteamNetworking, SteamNetworkingSockets): SteamNetworkingSockets was used to enable the ISteamNetworkingSockets networking API, but this has since become default. SteamNetworking can be used to revert to the older, deprecated ISteamNetworking networking API.

-NoDefaultLog: Disables log file creation unless a plugin calls setLogFilePath.

-NoDeferAssets: Disable the deferring of loading vehicles and level objects until map load time, and instead load on startup.

-NoPreserveMissingObjects: By default, the level editor keeps objects and foliage whose assets are missing. If this option is enabled, any missing assets are deleted instead.

-NoSteamTextFiltering: Disable Steam text filter, and instead revert to the old naïve filter.

-NoWorkshopSubscriptions: Disable loading of all Steam Workshop subscriptions. This can be helpful when troubleshooting issues.

-OfflineOnly: Disables requests to the internet. For LAN servers, it skips the Steam backend connection and uses locally-cached Workshop items.

-ParseAssetMetadata: Enables parsing asset file metadata like comments and line numbers. Useful for development (e.g., error messages) at the cost of slower loading and increased memory usage. Plugin developers building on this feature may be interested in Dat Editing Code.

-PreviewLevelBatchingTextureAtlas: Please refer to Level Batching for more details.

-PreviewLevelBatchingUniqueMaterials: Please refer to Level Batching for more details.

-RazerChroma: Enable Razer Chroma integration on compatible devices.

-RefreshRate=: Monitor refresh rate override.

-ResaveAssets: Danger! Only use this if you have a backup of your custom assets, ideally in version control. Here be dragons:

Depends on the -ParseAssetMetadata launch option also being enabled.

This is our first experiment with automatically patching asset files. It will attempt to preserve comments and line numbers in your files (this is why asset metadata is needed). However, certain comments may not be preserved. In particular, comments with blank lines surrounding them.

At the time of writing (2025-05-06) the game will convert blueprints from the legacy (Blueprint_*** prefix) format to newer list-based format. It cannot yet auto-convert blueprints with NPC conditions or rewards because we haven’t written conversion code for those yet, but it’s on our wishlist.

-ResetSteamStatsAndAchievements: Reset all progress on Steam achievements and stats.

-SkipAssets: Disable loading asset bundles and Workshop content. This is useful for quickly iterating on serverside code.

-ScrollViewSensitivity float: Multiplier for uGUI scroll view distance travelled when rolling the mouse wheel.

-TimeOverlay: Show seconds since startup under FPS in the upper-left corner.

-ui_scale: UI scale override. A common usage is to set UI scale back to its default scaling, with -ui_scale 1.

-UnlockSteamAchievements: Unlocks all Steam achievements. This is intended for achievement hunters who’ve moved on from the game but want to maintain their previous 100% completion status.

-UnredactedLogs: By default, player IPs in BattlEye’s logging and the public IP for Workshop downloads are redacted. This option turns that off.

-UseLevelBatching bool: Overrides whether level batching can be enabled. Per-level support for level batching is still required. For example -UseLevelBatching=false disables it. Please refer to Level Batching for more details.

-ValidateAssets: Perform additional health checks on assets during start-up.

-ValidateLevelBatchingUVs: Please refer to Level Batching for more details.

-w int: Alias of -width.

-width int: Override in-game resolution width.

Unity Options

Unity’s built-in command-line arguments take priority over Unturned’s equivalents. Some of the more relevant Unity arguments are mentioned below, but the rest can be found in the Unity User Manual.

-batchmode: Run in batch mode.

-force-glcore: Force OpenGL.

-force-vulkan: Force Vulkan.

-nographics: Do not initialize the graphics device when running in batch mode.