Hosting an Avorion server: the complete guide
Avorion is a persistent-galaxy game: you build a ship, set up a station, and come back three evenings later where you left off. As long as the game lives on one player's PC, it stops when they disconnect — and nobody else can make progress. A dedicated server fixes that, and here it is only billed for the hours it runs.
1. Create the server
Pick Avorion, the RAM and the performance level. The server starts on its own; you get a stable connection address and a password to share.
Only one choice is made at creation and cannot be revisited: the galaxy seed. Left empty it is drawn at random; filled in, it gives back exactly the same galaxy.
2. The first start generates the galaxy
The game is baked into the image we serve: there is nothing to download at start-up, unlike most Steam servers. What the first start spends its time on is generating the galaxy, before the server announces itself as ready. Later starts are shorter: the galaxy already exists and is simply loaded.
3. The settings you can change any time
| Setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Welcome message | Shown to players as they join. |
| Player-to-player damage | Off, nobody can shoot an ally. On by default. |
| Same starting sector | Everyone starts in the same place — the setting to keep if you want to play together from minute one. |
| Infinite resources | Asteroids never run dry. For building without constraints. |
| Collision damage | Normal, halved, or none. Halved, manoeuvres forgive a lot more. |
They are changed from your console and take effect on the next start.
4. Joining the game
In the game, connect to the server with the address and port shown in your console, then enter the password.
You have no ports to open: the game port (27000) and the three Steam ports the server uses are already in place.
The server takes 4 players by default, up to 10.
Two details that save an unpleasant surprise:
- Your server is not publicly listed in the game's server browser. You connect by its address, and the password stays the door. That is deliberate: a server among friends has no business in a public list.
- There is no console for Avorion in your account. Its admin protocol is not the one we speak on the other games, and we would rather not open a door we do not control. The address, the server state and the connected players are still visible.
5. Your galaxy is kept between sessions
When you stop the server, the game receives the shutdown signal, saves, then exits: that is its own behaviour, and the one we rely on. The galaxy is then archived and restored on the next start, on a brand-new machine.
Avorion can also make its own backup copies inside the galaxy folder; we leave those disabled, because we are the ones taking the archive — an internal duplicate would only make it bigger without protecting anything more. The backups option, for its part, keeps several of them, spread over several days back.
Already have a galaxy running? Bring it over:
- Grab your galaxy folder: the one that contains
sectors/andserver.ini. - Zip its contents — or the folder itself, we strip that level on our own.
- Upload the archive when you create the server.
6. How much RAM?
Avorion is the hungriest game in its category here, and that is not an opinion: the two technical pages we checked before opening it both ask for 6 GB of memory for the server, one quoting “4 to 6 GB” and the other 6 GB flat.
| Your game | What we recommend |
|---|---|
| 1 to 10 players, vanilla | 8 GB |
Why 8 and not 6: those are machine gigabytes, not an internal game setting. Asking for 6 GB on a 4 GB VM leaves nothing for the system or the disk cache — the next tier up is the first one that keeps the promise. The same sources also mention a quad-core CPU: if you tend to gather in a single sector, that is the argument for the dedicated CPU level rather than the eco one.
The price follows the RAM and the performance level, never the game.
7. Shut it down when you are done
Server off = €0. Auto-shutdown kicks in on its own once nobody is connected, and the galaxy comes back untouched next time. On a game played in campaigns — two intense weeks, then nothing until the next update — that is where the gap with a monthly plan opens up.