What is a schedule?

A schedule runs actions on your server automatically, at times you choose, whether or not you are online. Instead of remembering to restart the server every night or to announce a reset before it happens, you set it once and the panel does it for you on the clock. This page lists every schedule on your server and is where you create new ones.

How the timing works: cron

The time a schedule runs is written as a cron expression, which is five small fields that together answer the question "when should this happen?". Each field controls one part of the timing, and a star means "every". You do not need to memorise it; the panel gives you a box for each field and a cheatsheet, and once you have seen a couple of examples it reads naturally.

Put those together and the whole expression describes a repeating moment. A few that cover almost everything most servers need:

• */5 * * * * runs every 5 minutes
• 0 * * * * runs once an hour, on the hour
• 0 3 * * * runs every day at 3 in the morning
• 0 0 * * 0 runs once a week, midnight on Sunday
• 0 0 1 * * runs on the first of every month

Schedules run on the panel's clock, which is usually UTC, not the time on your own computer. If you want a job at 3am your time, work out what that is in the panel's timezone first, or you will be restarting the server in the middle of someone's evening.

The two switches on every schedule

Beyond the timing, each schedule has two toggles that change how it behaves. Only When Server Is Online tells the schedule to skip a run whenever the server is off, which is exactly what you want for something like an automatic restart: if you have deliberately stopped the server, you do not want the schedule quietly booting it back up. Schedule Enabled is the master switch, and it is what makes a schedule show as Active or Inactive in the list. Turning it off pauses the schedule completely without deleting it or its tasks, so you can shelve a routine for a while and switch it back on later untouched.

What people actually schedule

Scheduling is where a server stops needing babysitting. The most common routines are simple and make a real difference to how a server feels to play on:

• A nightly restart to clear memory and shake off the lag that builds up over a long uptime
• Automatic backups on a fixed cadence, so a snapshot always exists without anyone remembering to make one
• Timed in-game announcements, like a warning a few minutes before a restart or an event
• Off-peak maintenance, running heavier commands at 4am when nobody is on rather than during prime time

A schedule is the "when", tasks are the "what"

Creating a schedule here sets up the timing and the switches, but on its own it does nothing until you give it something to do. Those actions are called tasks, and you add them by opening a schedule from this list. A single schedule can chain several tasks in order, which is how a "restart at midnight" turns into announce, wait, back up, then restart, all from one entry. The next page covers building those task sequences in full.