Hey 'Scapers,
Dedicated servers have been something that we've heard from you about a great many times since we launched into Early Access - your hopes, your excitement and your enthusiasm.
Throughout the journey since Early Access launched back in April, the team have been hard at work making excellent progress across all fronts: optimisation, performance, bugfixing and content development. While that work has been going ahead, we've also been working on developing our network systems to support Dedicated Servers.
We are delighted to confirm that we are on track for our release of Dedicated Servers with the 0.11 update, which we have provisionally earmarked for the end of March.
Users will have two options:
Hosting their own servers, using the Steam Server Binaries, on a computer at home or in the cloud.
This will require some technical knowledge, as ports will need to be opened in your router, or tinkering with cloud services if you wish to use AWS or Azure, for example.
Renting a server from one of our preferred hosting partners.
This will be familiar to players who have spooled up servers in other Survival Craft games with friends. We are working with a hosting partner to make this as straightforward as possible in a simple and affordable way, so you can get right into the action.
These will be available in one of two forms of server:
Moddable, customizable servers where you can adjust the rules and settings as you like, or...
"Vanilla" Dedicated Severs which cannot be modified, and will be fully secure. These will be flagged differently in the server list, so players can select servers knowing they are secured, and what you see is what you've earned authentically.
We obviously want to be able to support increased player counts, too!
We have already been testing these systems internally but are working on improving server browsing, as well as how we can facilitate adapting player saves to distinguish files, and allow your progress on these dedicated worlds to stand out and be protected. Next, we'll be focusing on customisation and world management options, and wider debugging overall. While we've been optimising the game since launch, we want to continue to refine this, even more so knowing that we want to increase the maximum player count further and reduce players' rental costs. Designers are also leaning in to help us better understand how to balance the game for a larger amount of players, and for worlds that exist for longer. Think damage multipliers, vault reset rates, reforestation, etc. We'll continue to pursue this beyond the initial release, of course.
We are still in the process of selecting the best hosting partner possible to support what we're looking to achieve, and refine the onboarding experience. We know it can be daunting, so we want to make the experience as easy and pleasant as possible.
We hope we can share more news on this as we get closer to the release of 0.11, so please stay tuned for more updates.