Getting started

You have installed aowlspt and imported a database (Installation). This is what the first session looks like.

• Start the game
• What a cold launch costs
• The two logs
• In the game
• The mod set you installed with
• What to do next

Start the game

D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt\aowlspt-launch.exe

The launcher does three things in order:

1. Starts aowlspt-backend.exe and waits until it actually answers on 127.0.0.1:<port> — a socket that accepts is exact, because the backend opens the port only after the last mod has loaded. It prints a line every five seconds while it waits and gives up after --backend-wait seconds (300 by default) with a warning rather than silently.
2. Starts EscapeFromTarkov.exe suspended, loads aowlspt-host-il2cpp.dll into it, and resumes.
3. If it cannot inject, it kills the client rather than resuming it — a game running without its host is worse than no game, because you would be in a raid before noticing.

Nothing in the install pretends to be a Windows component: no winhttp.dll, no doorstop, no BepInEx.

Useful flags:

flag	what it does
--dry-run	report what it would start, start nothing
--wait	keep the launcher open until the game exits, then stop the backend
--no-backend	start the client alone, when a backend is already running

Want the server in its own window? Start it yourself and launch with --no-backend:

D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt\aowlspt-backend.exe --root D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt --port 6969
D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt\aowlspt-launch.exe --no-backend

Stopping the server is killing it. There is no shutdown route; --wait terminates the backend when the game exits, and closing its window does the same. That is safe by design rather than by luck — a profile write is a temporary file renamed over the key, so there is no half-written value to find afterwards.

What a cold launch costs

The host waits for the game to bring the IL2CPP runtime up before it can resolve anything; aowlspt-host.json sets how long (waitForRuntimeMs).

The backend is the slow half. Measured on the development machine with the default mod set and a 39 MiB imported database: the game server alone answers in 0.6 s, and a full payload in about 2.9 s.

The two logs

Between them they answer nearly every question you will have.

file	what it holds
D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt\aowlspt-host.log	the client host: which mods loaded, what it resolved in the game
D:\Aowlspt\aowlspt\aowlspt-backend.log	the server: which mods loaded, which routes exist, what the mod manager resolved

If something is wrong, start there — Troubleshooting is organised around the lines you will find in them.

In the game

• Your profile. The server keeps profiles and they survive a restart. You pick which profile to play on at launch.
• F12 opens the settings pages: one page per mod, plus the game server's own settings and the full server config surface. Edits are written back to the mod's config.json and hot-applied where the mod supports it. See Configuration.
• F6 opens the admin panel, if aowl.admin is enabled — ESP, god mode, no-recoil, fly, teleport and the rest.
• Raids are offline. Pick a map, deploy, and you get a populated raid: bots by faction and role, generated loot, extracts, insurance and death handling. There is no other player and there is no matchmaking.

The mod set you installed with

A fresh install starts on aowl.list.vanillaplus: the game server plus the mods that change how the game feels without changing what is in it — the FOV fix, classic movement, sway, the performance settings and the texture pack. Other lists ship in the registry: aowl.list.raidnight turns the bot population up and adds the AI and faction mods, aowl.list.core is the minimum that can serve.

To change what is running, see Mods. Mods can be turned on and off while the server is serving, and client-side mods while the game is running.

What to do next

• Features — what the system does today.
• Mods — what ships, and what each one is for.
• Configuration — where the settings live.
• Troubleshooting — when it does not do the above.
• For mod developers — writing your own.