Terraria server hosting: the complete guide

Terraria plays perfectly well when one of you hosts the world from inside the game — right up to the moment that person has to log off and everybody stops. A dedicated server fixes that: the world lives on its own machine, the others keep playing without you, and you only pay for the hours it runs.

1. Create the server

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

Three choices are made at creation and cannot be changed afterwards — they define the world: its size, its difficulty and its seed.

2. Size, difficulty, seed: the three frozen decisions

⚠️ Journey is not a difficulty like the others. It requires every player to arrive with a Journey character: a classic character is refused at connection, and the other way round too. Settle it with your group before you create the server, not after.

A large world takes noticeably longer to create on the first start: generation happens before the game port opens, so the very first launch is always the slowest. Later ones simply reopen the saved world.

3. Joining the game

In game: Multiplayer → Join via IP, then paste the address shown in your dashboard, and the password.

You have no ports to open: the game port (7777, TCP) is already in place. Terraria uses that one only — it has no Steam relay and no separate query port.

The server takes 8 players by default, up to 16. The limit changes from the dashboard, without recreating the world.

4. Mods: what we do, and what we don't

Let's be straight about it: our Terraria servers run vanilla. No tModLoader, no mod repository, no manual install.

That isn't an oversight. tModLoader is a different executable from the game itself, with its own version chain and its own incompatibilities between mods — supporting it halfway means selling servers that fail to start one evening in three. If your run is modded, a host that specialises in tModLoader will serve you better than we will.

Everything else about the game is there: all four difficulties, all three world sizes, special seeds, PvP, teams.

5. The welcome message

A message shows in chat every time somebody connects. By default it carries your server's name followed by tickserv.com — replace it with whatever you like, or empty it to fall back on the game's own message.

6. How much RAM?

Terraria is light on memory and demanding on a single core: its simulation loop is single-threaded, so clock speed matters more than core count.

The price follows the RAM and the performance level, never the game: a Terraria server and a Minecraft server of the same size cost exactly the same.

7. Your world is kept between sessions

The world is saved on shutdown and restored on the next start, at no cost. While the server runs, a timestamped backup is taken regularly and the most recent one is kept; the backup option keeps several, staggered over several days back.

Already have a world going elsewhere? Bring it over:

1. Get your world's .wld file — and its .twld if there is one, it holds the extra data.
2. Put those files at the root of the archive, with no folder around them.
3. Upload the archive when you create the server.

8. Shut down when you're done

Server off = €0. Auto-shutdown kicks in on its own once nobody is connected; the world is saved at that moment and reopened exactly as it was on the next start.

That is the whole difference with a monthly plan: at a classic host, a Terraria server for a group of friends is billed every month, including the weeks nobody plays. Here, a few evenings a week costs a few tens of cents a month.

Create your Terraria server · What it costs, exactly