We all know the classics, Mine Craft, Rust, Stardew Valley, etc. What are some one’s you see people less aware of are self hostable?
In the style of those games, self hosting a Vintage Story server is extremely easy to do. Extremely easy to customize, well documented wiki.
I’ve been running mine for over a year with zero hassle on a tiny server.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart or Doctor Robotniks Ring Racers. It’s a good time if you have friends and there are still regular players online.
To add my own two cents into this mix.
RuneScape classic with the fan made OepnRSC
And Final Fantasy XI … kiinnddaa. Not sure if that one’s feature complete yet or ever will be. But there’s a fan server effort for it like RuneScape.
2009scape
Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.
I set up a BBS with legend of the Red Dragon! Only runs locally right now but pretty cool to see running.
Haven’t heard Red Dragon referenced in a very long time. Loved that game.
Every now and then I will jump back into whatever flavor of MUD seems interesting for a few weeks. They’re so much fun but like you say, nobody plays them.
I’ve been thinking about hosting a Quake II server, lately.
Starseige tribes? Trackmania?
Trackmania can be self hosted? I’d love a friends-only score board and custom track rotations
Final Fantasy XI is still a beautiful game and is self hostable, but as with most MMORPGs, you need lots of people to get the full experience. Luckily if you’re hosting your own, you can always mod settings to make yourself lvl 99, turn off enemy AI, teleport anywhere, or whatever.
Palworld and Terraria, particularly with Tmodloader, are fun options.
Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.
Im kinda confused there. On steam the devs recently posted an update, that MP is now available, but it seems that it has been for a while?
Was it in beta up until now or was it fan made?
The devs typically take a long time between releases, and the latest version, build 42 came out this year (4 years after build 41), and initially this new version didn’t have MP support. So the recent announcement is about adding MP for build 42, but MP was already available in previous versions.
Aaah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining
So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”
They are between builds.
B41 stable has been out for ages with multiplayer support. It’s the current version and what you get if you don’t opt in to experiential builds.
On unstable builds, the devs remove multiplayer initially until they think it’s good enough. B42 unstable is in active development and just recently added multiplayer support.
B42 is still a bug-ridden crapshoot though, stick with 41 if you want to play online.
V-rising
A sort of diablo-style game where you are the bad guy vampire. Very fun, but the damn server doesn’t pause time when it is empty, so I can only spin it up when I plan to play, not have it on all the time like valheim if my friends want to jump in without me and play
It would be nice if we could disable the decay mechanic entirely for singleplayer and small servers where we don’t need to worry about real estate squatting.
My two most popular public game servers are Necesse and Rimworld Together. Neither have many public servers.
I set up roller coaster tycoon 2 using the OpenRCT2 docker container , pretty cool.
I ran a fairly popular RTCW server back in the day… Insta-gib and sniper rifles only. Good times.
We’ve spent last few months playing Enshrouded. The dedicated server is a resource hog tho, even on an empty server it’d use a ton of CPU time. Still lots of fun with a few friends exploring and building stuff











