Three newcomers join the catalogue at once: OpenTTD, Avorion and Necesse. They have little in common, other than being games you pick up in waves — exactly the shape where paying a monthly plan for twelve hours of play makes no sense.
OpenTTD, the lightest server we know how to run
The railway-and-truck network game, open source for twenty years. A server takes 8 players by default, up to 25, and sits in 25 MiB of memory at rest — measured on the image we serve, and by far the lightest of our games.
Three choices are locked when the map is generated, because the game can neither grow it nor change its climate: the size (up to 1024 × 1024), the landscape and the starting year.
Avorion, a galaxy that goes on without you
Ship building, trade and exploration in a procedural galaxy. 4 players by default, up to 10. The galaxy seed is locked at creation; everything else — player-to-player damage, same starting sector, infinite resources, collision damage — can be changed whenever you like. The game is baked into the image: nothing to download at start-up.
Necesse, ready in seven seconds
Top-down co-op survival and building. 8 players by default, up to 20, a console with kick and ban, and an automatic save about every minute with a backup copy. On our test bench, the server was ready in seven seconds.
We ran the images before selling them
Our first acceptance run failed on a single point: on the second start, Necesse announced it had created a brand-new world. Looking for the reason, we launched all three locally — and each one surfaced a defect that reading the files had not. Seven fixes, two of which the acceptance run itself could not have caught:
- OpenTTD was running with no password. Since version 14, the game splits its configuration across three files, and only opens the one holding the password if the first declares its ini version. Without that line: a server open to anyone who knows the address, without a word. The run checked that the interface handed you your password — not that the game applied it.
- Necesse's world was not where we had put it. The game writes
saves/worlds/<name>.zip, with an intermediate folder that appears nowhere in its documentation. Our import was looking for a file that did not exist.
The other five: data folder ownership (OpenTTD wrote absolutely nothing, so no save at all), two player-counting patterns that would never have counted anyone — both games timestamp their console lines —, Avorion's version read in the wrong place, and the empty name that granted owner rights on a Necesse server.
All three then passed acceptance on real machines, end to end: creation, start, connection address, password, settings, shutdown, second start on a restored world, deletion, and the provider's inventory back to zero.
One guide per game, in three languages
Each has its full guide: OpenTTD, Avorion and Necesse — what gets locked in, how to join, the RAM we recommend, and how to bring over a game you have already started.
What this doesn't solve
All three servers are vanilla: no mod upload, and no NewGRF for OpenTTD. There is no console for OpenTTD or Avorion either — their admin protocols are not the ones we speak elsewhere, and we would rather not open a door we do not control.
Finally, the RAM we recommend for Avorion (8 GB) comes from two hosting providers' technical pages, not from our own measurement. We will replace it as soon as a real play session gives us ours — that is the rule we apply everywhere else, so we may as well say it here.