pz-nitrado-mcp

An MCP server for managing a Project Zomboid dedicated server hosted on Nitrado, so you can check status, tune sandbox settings and manage mods by talking to Claude instead of clicking through the web panel.

There is no official Nitrado MCP server; the only community one targets ARK. This one speaks PZ: it knows where servertest.ini and SandboxVars.lua actually live, edits the .ini without trashing your comments, and keeps Mods and WorkshopItems in sync.

Tools

Every write takes a timestamped backup next to the original first, so a bad edit is always recoverable from the file server. The five most recent backups per file are kept and older ones are pruned — set PZ_BACKUP_KEEP to change that, or to 0 to disable backups entirely.

Related MCP server: bazzite-mcp

Setup

1. Get a Nitrado API token

In the Nitrado panel: your account menu → Developer (or /developer) → Create token. Tick the service scope and nothing else — it covers gameserver status, the file server and restarts. In particular do not tick service_order, which allows ordering (and paying for) new services. The token is shown once; treat it like a password.

2. Install

git clone https://github.com/aolmosj/pz-nitrado-mcp.git
cd pz-nitrado-mcp
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt      # editable install; add ".[dev]" for tests

Or straight from GitHub into an existing environment:

pip install git+https://github.com/aolmosj/pz-nitrado-mcp.git

3. Store the token

Put it in the shared config directory, so every project and session picks it up and it never lives inside an editor config file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/nitrado && chmod 700 ~/.config/nitrado
printf '%s' 'your-token-here' > ~/.config/nitrado/token
chmod 600 ~/.config/nitrado/token

# optional: a default service id, so tools can omit it
printf '%s' '1234567' > ~/.config/nitrado/service_id

Use printf rather than echo to avoid a trailing newline — though the server strips whitespace anyway. It warns on stderr if the token file is readable by other users.

Don't know your service id? Leave it out and ask nitrado_list_services.

4. Register it with Claude Code

Add to .mcp.json in your project (or ~/.claude.json for all projects). No credentials here — they come from the config directory:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pz-nitrado": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/pz-nitrado-mcp/.venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["-m", "pz_nitrado_mcp"]
    }
  }
}

The installed console script works too, if you prefer a single token: "command": "/absolute/path/to/.venv/bin/pz-nitrado-mcp" with no args.

Don't reach for a cwd field. It is tempting to skip the install and point cwd at the checkout instead — but Claude Code does not apply it, so the server starts somewhere else, fails with No module named pz_nitrado_mcp, and the client reports only -32000: Connection closed. claude mcp list shows the underlying error.

Configuration reference

Each setting is resolved from the first source that has it:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME is honoured if set.

Two behaviour switches, environment-only:

Usage

Once registered, just ask:

• "¿Está arriba el servidor? ¿Quién está jugando?"

• "Sube la población de zombis a insane y baja el loot a rare"

• "Añade Authentic Z y Brita's Weapon Pack, y reinicia"

• "¿Qué mods tengo instalados ahora mismo?"

Reading logs

PZ rotates its logs on every server start, naming them DD-MM-YY_HH-MM-SS_<kind>.txt under Zomboid/Logs/, alongside a live server-console.txt. You don't need to know the timestamps — pz_tail_log takes a kind and resolves it to the most recent file:

• console — the live server console (default; where crashes and mod load failures show up)

• chat, user, admin, pvp, map, item, cmd — PZ's per-category logs

• DebugLog-server — verbose server debug output

Only the tail is fetched, using Nitrado's seek endpoint with a negative byte offset, so tailing a multi-megabyte log stays cheap. The endpoint caps each request at 64 KiB, so large tails page backwards in chunks. The optional contains filter is applied to the fetched window — if you expect older matches, raise lines rather than assuming there are none.

Sandbox settings

SandboxVars.lua holds ~270 settings — zombie population and speed, loot rarity, day length, XP rates, erosion. Most are numeric enums whose meaning is documented in comments right above them, and pz_get_sandbox returns those comments alongside the value:

pz_get_sandbox(search="insane")

  Zombies = 4
    Changing this also sets the "Population Multiplier". Default = Normal
    1 = Insane   2 = Very High   3 = High   4 = Normal   5 = Low   6 = None

So "make the zombies insane" becomes pz_set_sandbox({"Zombies": 1}) without anyone having to memorise the numbering. Nested settings use dotted names (ZombieLore.Speed, MultiplierConfig.*).

Edits are line-surgical: only the lines you name change, and the file's 738 comments, ordering and numeric formatting survive untouched. Writing 2 into a setting that reads 0.8 produces 2.0, not 2.

Unknown setting names are rejected, not appended. The game silently ignores settings it doesn't recognise, so a typo would otherwise look like it worked and do nothing; the error suggests the closest real names instead.

Configuration history

Nitrado snapshots the config most days, and keeps whatever you save by hand — the panel's "Perfiles de Configuración". pz_diff_config_profile is the useful end of it: point it at a snapshot and it reports only what differs from the config running now.

pz_diff_config_profile("09.07.2026 - 22:21")

  differences: 111
    PVP:        'false' -> 'true'
    NoFire:     'true'  -> 'false'
    Mods:       'Ashenwood;BBL;Blackwood;…(+6000 more chars)' -> 'CleanHotBar'

⚠️ These snapshots contain passwords in plain text — the admin password in the settings block, and the server and RCON passwords inside the config file. Every profile tool redacts them by default; include_secrets=true turns that off deliberately. A profile is a full copy of your config, so treat its output as sensitive.

Long values are abbreviated so one enormous Mods line doesn't bury the rest of a diff; pass full_values=true when you need the whole thing.

Event log vs game log

Two different things, easy to confuse:

• nitrado_event_log — what people did to the service. Restarts, stops, file uploads and deletions, settings changes, game installs, each with the account name and a timestamp. This is the panel's "Registro de eventos".

• pz_tail_log — what the game did. Startup sequence, errors, chat, connections.

"Who restarted the server at 3am?" is the first; "why did it crash?" is the second.

Config writes made through this MCP server show up in the event log as filebrowser uploads, so its own activity is auditable alongside everything else. Filtering is done client-side because the endpoint ignores filter parameters, and category matching is case-insensitive — the live log contains both server and Server, and an exact match silently drops the latter (which is where the error entries live).

A note on mods

PZ needs two identifiers per mod and they are not interchangeable:

• workshopId — the numeric Steam Workshop id, what the server downloads

• modId — the string from the mod's mod.info, what the game loads

pz_set_mods takes both and keeps Mods= and WorkshopItems= consistent. List order is load order, which matters when mods conflict.

Notes and limitations

• Paths are discovered, not assumed. On Nitrado the gameserver root holds the game install; the server's own state lives under profile/Zomboid (Server/, Logs/, Saves/, server-console.txt). Other hosts differ, so the server probes candidate locations and identifies the right one by its contents. pz_locate_configs and pz_list_logs report what it found.

• Config files only exist after first boot. PZ writes servertest.ini and friends when the server first starts, so pz_locate_configs will fail on a server that has never run. Start it once from the panel.

• Changes need a restart. Nothing is applied live; every write tool says so.

• pz_restart is also "start". The API has no start action, so a server stopped with pz_stop comes back only via pz_restart. A restart takes about a minute (started → restarting → stopping → started), and the status lags a few seconds behind the request — a status of started immediately after calling restart doesn't mean it was ignored.

• Build 42 wants at least 8 GB of RAM. If the plan is smaller, you will feel it once several players are on.

Development

.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"     # pytest + pytest-asyncio
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q

The tests cover the config-manipulation logic — .ini editing, mod list merging, path resolution — which is the part that can corrupt a live server, and they run without touching the network.

License

MIT