Hosting a Barotrauma server: the complete guide

Barotrauma is played as a crew, in a submarine crossing Europa: a pilot, a mechanic, a medic, and a campaign that carries on from session to session. That is exactly what makes hosting on one player's PC painful — the campaign sleeps when they close the game, and the crew cannot move on without them. A dedicated server fixes that, and here it is only billed for the hours it runs.

1. Create the server

Pick Barotrauma, the RAM and the performance level. The server starts on its own; you get a stable connection address and a password to share.

There is nothing to lock in at creation: the campaign, the submarine and the game mode are picked in game, by the crew, once connected.

2. A short start-up

The game is baked into the image we serve — 252 MB, nothing like an ordinary Steam server. On every start the server still checks with Steam that it is up to date, then launches. Measured on our pre-production on 8 September 2026: server reported started 1 min 13 s after the container launched, verification included.

If Steam is unreachable, the server still starts with the game from the image: an outage on their side is no reason to leave you without a server.

3. Joining the game

In the game, connect with the address and port shown in your console, then enter the password.

You have no ports to open: the game port (27015) and the query port (27016) are already in place.

The server takes 8 players by default, up to 16.

Two things worth knowing up front:

• Your server is not publicly listed in the game's browser. You connect by its address, and the password stays the door. That is deliberate: a server for friends has no business in a public list.
• ⚠️ Barotrauma turns away a client whose version differs from the server's. That is a constraint of the game, not a hosting policy. Our servers follow the published version — a restarted server comes back on the current one, the very one Steam has already updated your players to.

4. Settings you can change whenever you like

Everything else — a good hundred round rules — is changed in game, in the server options, and what the crew changes there is kept from one session to the next.

5. No console in your account, and we measured why

On most games in our catalogue your account shows a console: connected players, a button to kick, one to ban. Not here, and the reason deserves to be stated plainly rather than glossed over.

Barotrauma's server only listens to its console if it runs in a real terminal. Without one it says so itself and ignores everything we send; with one, it asks that terminal a technical question before every reply and eats our command while waiting — tested on a real machine on 8 September 2026, a perfectly clean order came back as "command not found". A console that receives gibberish is not a console.

And even solved, it would not have given you buttons: this game's kick and ban commands are interactive — they ask for the reason, then the duration — whereas a button only sends one line.

What you keep: the address, the server state, the logs, the number of connected players, auto-shutdown — and the Karma setting from §4, which is the automatic moderation the game itself knows how to do alone.

6. Your campaign is kept between sessions

On shutdown the server gets its exit signal, writes its save, then exits. The folder is archived and restored on the next start, on a brand-new machine.

⚠️ One thing to know about this game in particular: only a campaign writes a save. A "mission" or "sandbox" round leaves nothing behind — that is how the game works, not an archiving fault. If you want your progress back, start a multiplayer campaign.

Already have a campaign running? Bring it over:

1. Grab your campaign's .save file, from the Multiplayer folder of your Barotrauma server.
2. Put it in the archive — several campaigns can travel together.
3. Upload the archive when you create the server. We file them in the right place keeping their names: the crew finds its campaign under the name they gave it, and picks it in game.

7. How much RAM?

This is the leanest game in our catalogue, and our two sources agree. The developers put their server at "a few hundred MB — 1 to 2 GB is plenty" for a small crew; specialist hosts recommend 4 GB from twelve to sixteen players or with mods, for real-world usage measured between 2.5 and 3.2 GB.

⚠️ And the tier above would add nothing, which is rare enough to be written down: what bounds Barotrauma is not memory but the speed of a single core — its server logic is largely single-threaded. If your sub stutters with a large crew, the lever is the dedicated CPU level, not more RAM.

The price follows the RAM and the performance level, never the game.

8. Mods

Barotrauma goes through the Steam Workshop, and we do not manage its mods: there is nothing to upload in your account.

⚠️ Every player installs the mods on their side (Workshop subscription), and the crew must have exactly the same list. Remember too that the server follows the published version of the game: after an update, a mod left behind may stop working.

9. Shut it down when you are done

Server off = €0. Auto-shutdown kicks in on its own once nobody is connected, and the campaign comes back untouched next time. On a game played in crew evenings, that is where the gap with a monthly plan opens up.

Create your Barotrauma server · What it costs, exactly