New World: How to Transfer Your Character Between Servers

New World‘s latest patch (update 1.0.3) includes quite a few fixes and improvements, but the big news at the moment is that the game’s long-awaited free server transfer feature is finally here.

While finally having the ability to transfer your New World character to another server should help players battle the MMO’s often absurd queue times, you may not be able to rest easy quite yet. While this won’t surprise veteran genre players, it turns out that New World‘s server transfer feature requires you to consider a number of variables.

With that in mind, here’s what you need to know about transferring your New World character to another server.

New World: When Can I Transfer My Character Between Servers?

Here’s what the New World team has to say about the game’s server transfer rollout timeline:

“When all worlds are back online from (the October 19/October 20) downtime, our plan is to monitor the framework we created without turning transfers on immediately. Once we have confirmed that the framework holds up at scale, we will turn on character server transfers in the Utopia world first, in the AP Southeast region. We will closely monitor transfers in this world, and if anything out of the ordinary occurs our team will need to make manual interventions. If all goes well, we will turn it on for the rest of the AP Southeast region, and continue monitoring. If after 8 hours our team hasn’t discovered any issues, we will fully deploy character server transfers to the other regions.”

The wording of that statement seems to be intentionally vague, but it sounds like character transfers will not be made available to every player at once. In fact, that statement really makes it sound like the New World team is initially going to be selective in terms of when players on specific servers gain access to transfers.

Having said that, barring complications, it sounds like the plan is to make server transfers available to most players by the end of the week.

New World: How Do I Transfer My Characters Between Servers?

It’s thankfully pretty easy to transfer your New World characters between servers, but there are a few things you need to do before completing the process.

Log into the character you want to transfer (you will need to be able to control them in-game, so you will need to wait through any existing queues).
Open the in-game store and navigate to the “World Transfer” tab. There, you will need to claim your complementary character transfer token.
Before you transfer your character, you will need to leave your current Company.
Remove any active sell orders and buy orders you may have at the Trading Post.
You will also need to go to a sanctuary location before you’re ableto transfer your character.
Choose the “Confirm Transfer” option once you’ve completed the steps outlined above and pick the server you wish to transfer to.

Ideally, the transfer itself will be pretty much instantaneous, but given that this is a new feature that a lot of people could be trying to use at once, don’t be surprised if there’s a delay or if you end up needing to go through the transfer process again.

New World: Will I Lose Anything If I Transfer My Character to Another Server?

The good news is that the New World team has confirmed that you will keep the following things if you transfer your character between servers:

All character progression benefits and unlocks
Your inventory and storage
All of your currency
Your houses and decorations
All of your quest progress

The bad news is that you will lose the following items if you decide to transfer your character:

You will lose your Company membership when you transfer servers
You will lose any transactions that were pending on the Trading Post
Your friends list will not be available on the new server

All things considered, it’s a pretty standard MMO transfer process in terms of what you lose and retain.

New World: What Are The Character Transfer Restrictions?

There are a few restrictions to consider when you transfer your New World character:

You can’t move your New World character to a server that is listed as “full”
You cannot move your character to a server that’s actively in mainteance
You can’t move your character to a server where you have another active character

Again, that’s all pretty standard, but not being able to transfer a character to a server that’s already full is a potentially big deal. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

New World: Will Future Character Transfers be Free?

As Amazon previously mentioned, your first character transfer token is free and will seemingly remain free for an indefinite period of time (based on what we’ve heard so far).

From there…well, it gets interesting.

Amazon has said that they are working on ways to allow New World players to complete additional transfers, but it’s not clear how that process is going to work at this time. The New World team has suggested that they will monitor the ongoing server situation to see if and when they need to enable future free server transfers, but they haven’t shared the specifics regarding when that might happen or what they’re looking for to “justify” that move.

The New World team has also said that they’re open to enabling a permanent “premium” transfer option, but again, there’s no word regarding when that might happen. It seems like the plan is to offer an additional free transfer opportunity before making the premium switch (and to warn players before they’ll have to start paying for transfer tokens), but we’re all still waiting on the specifics in terms of the price of those premium tokens and when they will become the new standard.

New World: Can You Transfer Characters Between Global Regions?

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to transfer your New World character between global regions. While the New World team previously hinted that would be a possibility, the first wave of transfers forces you to stay within your current region.

However, the New World team has mentioned that they’re looking into ways to enable cross-region transfers and will update players if and when that option becomes available. We assume that Amazon will still allow you to transfer your character for free at that time, but we’ll just have to wait for the full details.

New World: What Are the Best and Worst Servers to Transfer To?

There’s no universal rule for finding the “best” server to transfer to, but here are a few points to consider before you choose your new home:

If you mostly play New World with friends, be sure that you and your friends all have characters on the same server.
While you can’t transfer to “full” servers, be aware that New World servers tend to fill up quickly. As such, you may end up still having to deal with long queue times if you try to transfer to a “nearly” full server.
Servers with very low populations aren’t necessairly a bad thing. Not only do servers fill up quickly in New World, but low-pop servers could be ideal for PvE minded players or those who simply want to be able to log-in at will.
Olympus, Valgrind, and El Dorado are some of the absolute biggest New World servers at the moment, so you may want to avoid transfering your characters to them even if you somehow have the option to. Alternatviely, you may want to transfer your character soff those servers when possible.
Most players are looking to transfer their characters in order to play with friends on another server or avoid long queue times. If you’re pretty happy with your current server, there’s very little strategic benefit to moving your character to another server at this time.
It is absolutely possible to transfer your character to a server that will “die” in terms of population size over the next few weeks or months. While the New World team will likely enable additional transfer options if that becomes a widespread problem, you might want to wait a little bit for transfers to play out if you’re worried about sending your character to a potentially barren server.

While there’s currently no great way to see exactly how many people are on a particular New World server, this website that monitors streamer activity on New World‘s various servers could give you a slightly better idea of which servers you absolutely need to avoid because they’re way too full or, perhaps, too empty.

It’s also important to remember that some New World servers are designed to support/emphasize certain languages. Whether you’re looking to avoid or join those servers because of that feature, here is the currently known list of global servers that emphasize certain languages:

NA East Spanish/English Servers: