--- title: "A Holdfast server for your regiment's line battles" description: "Up to 150 slots, a password, a scheduled start before muster and €0 the rest of the week — plus what we have not yet measured under full load." url: https://tickserv.com/guides/holdfast-line-battle-server site: "TickServ (https://tickserv.com)" lang: en published: 2026-10-16 games: [holdfast] --- # A Holdfast server for your regiment's line battles A Holdfast regiment plays at fixed times: Wednesday drill, Saturday night line battle. The rest of the week, the server rented by the month sits idle, and the regiment pays for it anyway. This page answers one precise question: can you switch a Holdfast server on only for those slots, with enough room for a battle, and what does it really cost? It also says, plainly, what we have not yet seen with our own eyes. ## What the server does today - **Up to 150 slots.** 40 by default, adjustable from 2 to 150 in the server settings. 150 is the value the developer writes in its own configuration template and on its wiki; no official source goes beyond it, so neither do we. - **A player password.** The server is private: a password is generated at creation, you give it to the regiment, and you can change it. - **Nothing to open.** The game port (20100) and the Steam query port (27000), both UDP, are already in place. In game: server browser, "Join Custom Server", then the address shown in your dashboard. - **The regiment's name.** The name you give the server is the one it announces: we read it back in its answer to the Steam query, along with its slots and version. - **A stable address**, the same from one week to the next: nobody has to hand it out again before each battle. Holdfast keeps no world: every session starts again from the map rotation. There is nothing to save and nothing to import. ## Startup, measured The Holdfast dedicated server takes up about ten gigabytes once installed, and it is reinstalled from Steam at every start. That is what keeps it on the published version, the one Steam has already installed for your players. Measured on our pre-production on 10 October 2026, on an 8 GB machine: | Situation | Server ready after | | ------------------------------------------------- | ------------------ | | First start of the evening (fresh machine) | about 4 min 30 s | | Restart after a cut, within the hour already paid | about 2 min 20 s | In practice: have the server start **a quarter of an hour before muster**. Startup minutes are not billed: the meter starts when the server is running, and a start that fails costs nothing. ## On for the battle, off the rest of the week **Weekly scheduling.** You declare slots — a day, a start time, an end time, in your time zone — up to twenty. The server starts on its own at the beginning of the slot and stops on its own at the end. During the slot it stays on even when empty, which covers the quarter of an hour while the regiment gathers; it is therefore billed for the whole slot. Outside slots, it stops by itself after 15 minutes without players. Three rules to know before the first Saturday: - ⚠️ **At the end time, the server stops, even if the battle is not over.** Put your margin inside the slot. - A slot fits within one day: it ends before midnight. For a battle that runs late, start by hand or from Discord, and let auto-shutdown close up behind the last player. - A scheduled start needs a balance: with no credit, the server does not start. **Discord.** Link the regiment's Discord, and the `/wake`, `/status` and `/sleep` commands drive the server from there. Any member of the linked Discord can use them. Linking uses a one-time code, confirmed inside the Discord by someone with the "Manage Server" permission: nobody can attach your server to someone else's Discord. **Officers.** An invite link gives an officer the "Can start" role: they switch the server on and off without going through you, and the bill stays on your account. They need a TickServ account. Players need none: the address and the password are enough. ## What it costs The price depends on RAM and performance level, never on the game. For Holdfast, two sizes are recommended: | RAM | Level | Price per hour | | ---------- | ------------- | -------------- | | 8 GB | Eco | **€0.03** | | 16 GB | Dedicated CPU | **€0.13** | A 2-hour drill on Wednesday and a 3-hour battle on Saturday make 5 hours a week, about 22 hours a month (5 × 52 ÷ 12). Billed per started hour, that comes to **€0.66** a month on Eco and **€2.86** on dedicated CPU. Server off, €0. Against that, we use **€8** as a reference for a monthly Holdfast plan. It is a provisional reference: several hosts rent Holdfast by the month, often in player brackets, and this deliberately low figure has not been taken from a specific price list. It is enough to place the threshold honestly: on dedicated CPU, a monthly plan becomes cheaper beyond about sixty hours a month, roughly 14 hours a week. A regiment that plays every night is better off staying monthly. If several officers want to split the bill, the shared wallet does it: [the event server guide](https://tickserv.com/guides/game-server-for-events) goes through the maths and the sharing. ## Which level for a 100- or 150-player battle? What we measured: idle, the server uses about 9% of the processor and less than one gigabyte of RAM, on the 8 GB Eco machine. The developer publishes no hardware requirements for the server. ⚠️ **What we have not measured: a full server.** No 100- or 150-player battle has run on our servers. During acceptance testing, no real player has yet joined one of our Holdfast servers: our tests query the server the way the server browser does, which does not replace a game client. So we will not promise you a figure we have not seen. What we recommend in the meantime: - **8 GB Eco** for a drill with a few dozen players; - **16 GB dedicated CPU** for Saturday's line battle: under heavy load, reserved cores are what count, not memory; - and **a trial before the big day.** The first hour of play is on us: run the week's drill on the server before bringing the battle to it, and change size if it stutters. If you fill the server, tell us what you saw: that is the measurement we are missing. ## What is missing today Better to know before moving a regiment: - **No in-game admin access.** The developer's template ships with an admin password everybody knows; we replace it with a password drawn at random inside the machine, which is not passed on to you. In practice, no `rc login` for your officers: no kicks, no map changes from inside the game. - **No console in your dashboard** for this game: you keep the server status, its logs, the number of connected players and auto-shutdown. - **The map rotation is the developer's template.** It cannot be edited from your dashboard. - **No managed mods.** If one of these lines is a blocker for your regiment, tell us: that is what decides what we build next. > [Create your Holdfast server](https://tickserv.com/games/holdfast) · [What it costs, exactly](https://tickserv.com/cost/holdfast)