How to set up a Discord bot with sten.wtf
Your own bot, in your own server, running on your own branding — about fifteen minutes end to end. Most of that is Discord's side; ours is four fields and a sync.
A bot on sten.wtf is genuinely yours. It runs under your own Discord application, wears your name and avatar, and lives in your server. We run the process and connect it to your account inventory; Discord considers it your bot, because it is.
The setup splits cleanly: Discord's side (steps 1–2 and 4), then ours (3, 5, 6). Do them in this order — step 4 is much easier once the bot exists on our side.
Before you start
- An active licence on your sten.wtf account.
- Manage Server permission in the Discord server you are adding it to.
- A few minutes of undisturbed attention for step 1 — the token is shown once.
Setup
Create a Discord application
Go to the Discord Developer Portal and hit New Application. Name it whatever your users should see — this is the display name, and it can be changed later.
Open the Bot tab, then Reset Token and copy what appears. Discord shows a bot token exactly once. If you navigate away without copying it, reset it again — there is no way to reveal the old one.
Enable privileged intents
Still on the Bot tab, scroll to Privileged Gateway Intents and turn on Server Members Intent and Message Content Intent. Save.
This is the step people skip, and it fails in a confusing way: the bot connects, appears online, and then silently does nothing when someone interacts with it. If your bot is online but inert, come back here first.
Add the bot on sten.wtf
In the dashboard, open Bots and choose Create bot. Paste the token from step 1 and give the bot a name for your own reference.
The token is validated against Discord immediately, so a typo is caught here rather than surfacing as a mystery outage later. Once it is accepted, the token is encrypted at rest and never shown back to you in full.
Invite it to your server
Use the invite link the dashboard generates for the bot rather than building one by hand in the developer portal. It requests exactly the permissions the bot actually uses and nothing more — a hand-built Administrator invite works, but it hands a bot far more authority over your server than it needs.
Pick your server, confirm, and the bot appears in your member list.
Configure channels and behaviour
Back in the dashboard, open the bot and work through its settings. The ones worth getting right immediately:
- Claim channel — where accounts are posted for your users to claim.
- Hits channel — where successful secures are announced.
- Claim ping — the role or everyone-mention attached to a claim post. Set this deliberately; it is the difference between a useful notification and a server full of people muting your bot.
- Embeds and branding — colours, titles, and images. See the embed customization guide for how to make these read well.
Sync slash commands
Finally, sync commands from the dashboard. Discord registers them per-application, so they will not appear in the client until this runs.
Global command propagation can take up to an hour on Discord's side. If the commands are missing right after a sync, that is usually what you are seeing — try the server again a little later before assuming something is broken.
Troubleshooting
The bot shows as offline
Almost always the token. If you reset it in the developer portal after adding it here, the old one stopped working the moment you did — update it in the dashboard.
It is online but ignores everything
Privileged intents, step 2. Enable both, save, and restart the bot from the dashboard.
Slash commands do not appear
Run the sync, then wait. If they are still missing after an hour, confirm the invite included the applications.commandsscope — the dashboard's generated link does, hand-built ones often do not.
It cannot post in a channel
Channel-level overrides beat server-level role permissions in Discord. A bot with permission everywhere can still be denied in one specific channel. Check that channel's permissions directly.
Where to go next
Once the basics work, the interesting part is Modules — self-contained pieces of behaviour you can install onto a bot: tickets, giveaways, welcome flows, leaderboards, reaction roles, auto-responders. There is a visual builder for making your own, and an AI assistant that can draft one from a description.