Hello!
I had the same thing happen on my hosted server. I ended up looking up the commands on wiki, (I'll link it below) opened the game and typed them into the in-game chat box, then restarted the game/server and it worked. You can't do worldgen settings this way (landcover scale etc...) but the deposit spawn rates and all of that worked! I thought at first it was the server so I contacted the host and they said that this is an issue they've had with this game from other people as well! Hope this helps! https://wiki.vintagestory.at/List_of_server_commands