Hosting a Vintage Story server: the complete guide

Vintage Story is played slowly, together, on a world you shape season after season: you dig, you forge, you keep the fire going. It is a long-game game, and that is exactly what makes hosting on one player's PC painful — the world sleeps when they close it. A dedicated server keeps it standing between sessions, and here it is only billed for the hours it runs.

1. Create the server

Pick Vintage Story, 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 welcome message and PvP can be changed whenever you like, and the world is generated on the first start.

2. The server is downloaded again on every start

This is a peculiarity of this game here: the image we serve holds no game binaries, and the server is downloaded from the publisher on every start, from the stable channel. Measured on 8 September 2026: ready about thirty seconds after launch, download and extraction included; on a real machine, 69 seconds on the first start and 2 min 8 s end to end on the next one, restored world included.

That is not a technical detail: it means your server always runs the published stable version. It is a constraint of the game, not a matter of convenience — a client and a server on different versions do not talk to each other, and your players' client updates itself on its side.

3. Joining the game

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

You have no ports to open: the game port (42420) is already in place.

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

⚠️ The setting that would have kept your friends outside without anyone noticing. Since version 1.20, a Vintage Story server comes out of the box in whitelist mode: without a personal invitation nobody gets in, correct password or not. We switch it off at creation, so that the password is the only door — which is what someone opening a server for friends expects. If you would rather have it the other way round, the console can add players to the whitelist.

4. The console, and what it can do

Vintage Story is one of the games with a console in your account: you can kick, ban and manage the whitelist while the game runs, in one click.

Three points, all measured on this game:

• The ban is permanent in practice. This game demands a duration and a reason — without them it refuses and bans nobody — so we send a duration so long it amounts to "forever", as on the other games in our catalogue.
• The reason shown to a banned player is in English. The server speaks English, and that language does not follow the one your account is in.
• If you type a command by hand, start it with a slash (/list clients). Without it, the server takes your line for a message and broadcasts it in the game's chat.

5. Settings you can change whenever you like

6. Your world is kept between sessions

A Vintage Story world is a database — one single file, plus its journal. That explains the precaution below, and it took us some work.

Killing this server abruptly saves nothing: measured on 8 September 2026, the container exits in two seconds without the game having written anything at all. So our shutdown does something else: it asks the game to save first, waits for it to answer "World saved!", and only then archives and switches off. And if nothing had been written, we refuse to overwrite the previous archive rather than replace it with emptiness.

Already have a world running? Bring it over:

1. Grab your world's .vcdbs file, from the Saves folder of your Vintage Story server.
2. Put it in the archive — no need to rebuild a folder tree.
3. Upload the archive when you create the server. We rename it to the name the server reads, otherwise it would sit on the disk and never be loaded.

One world is served per server: if the archive holds several, we keep the biggest, which is the most advanced one.

7. How much RAM?

Two sources, of different kinds, and that is deliberate. Our own measurement gives the floor: about 1.2 GB at idle, server started and world generated. The rule published by specialist hosts gives the progression: 1 GB of base, plus 300 MB per player.

Those are machine GB, not an internal setting: this server manages its memory on its own, there is no field for you to fill. With a lot of mods, count about 30% more according to the same source — so one tier up.

⚠️ What bounds this game at start-up is the processor, not the memory. Observed on our smallest size: while generating the first terrain, the server itself reports a few passing slowdowns. It is transient and harmless on a world for friends; if you plan to generate a large world, take the dedicated CPU level.

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

8. Mods

You can upload your own mods: .zip files go into the Mods/ folder from the file manager in your account, and they are loaded on the next start. Verified end to end on 8 September 2026: the server announces them in its logs and loads them. They travel with your world, so they are still there next session.

⚠️ Every player must install exactly the same mods on their side: the server does not push them to clients.

9. Shut it down when you are done

Server off = €0. Auto-shutdown kicks in on its own once nobody is connected — after the save from §6 — and the world comes back untouched next time. On a game you pick up one evening a week for months, that is where the gap with a monthly plan opens up.

Create your Vintage Story server · What it costs, exactly