Sandbox and Survival Game Server Hosting: What to Look For

Survival and sandbox games - Rust, Valheim, Palworld, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid, Satisfactory, Terraria - share a hosting profile that sets them apart from session-based shooters. They run a single persistent world that needs to stay online whether or not the owner is playing, they tend to be hungry for memory, and most of them live and die on mods. This guide covers what actually matters when you host one, and which of these games you can run on Zeros Host today.

Why a dedicated server

Most of these games let one player host from inside their own game. That works until it does not: the world is only online when that person is playing, everyone else's progress depends on their connection, and their machine carries the whole simulation. A dedicated server removes that single point of failure. The world runs as its own process on hardware built to stay up, so anyone in your group can join at any time and progress is saved centrally.

Memory is usually the bottleneck

Survival worlds are simulated continuously - entities, physics, AI, and a world that persists and grows. RAM is almost always the first resource you run short of, and the requirement scales with both player count and how much of the world has been explored or built. As a rough guide: Terraria and Valheim are comparatively light (a couple of gigabytes for a small group), Project Zomboid and Rust sit in the middle, and Palworld, 7 Days to Die, and Satisfactory are heavy - Palworld alone wants around 16 GB for a small group. Size your plan against the game and your peak player count, not the minimum on a store page.

Single-thread CPU speed matters

Many of these engines run their core game loop on a single thread, so clock speed per core matters more than core count. A high-core-count server that is slow per core will tick worse than a faster quad-core. This is why "how many GB of RAM" is not the whole story - ask about the underlying hardware too.

Mods, and keeping them in sync

Workshop addons, BepInEx plugins, Oxide and Carbon, overhaul mods - the modding layer is a big part of why people run their own server. Two things to plan for: most gameplay mods must be installed on both the server and every client at matching versions, and game updates routinely break mods until authors catch up. A good host makes mod installation and version control straightforward and lets you roll back when an update breaks something.

Backups and updates

A persistent world is only as safe as your last backup. Corruption, a bad mod update, or a wipe gone wrong can cost weeks of progress. Automatic, scheduled backups you can restore from in a couple of clicks are not optional for survival hosting. Updates matter too: an out-of-date server usually refuses connections from updated clients, so the host needs to make updating painless.

Per-game hosting guides

We have written step-by-step "how to host" guides for several survival and sandbox games, covering SteamCMD installation, requirements, configuration, ports, and mods:

• How to host a Palworld server
• How to host a Valheim server
• How to host a 7 Days to Die server
• How to host a Satisfactory server
• How to host a Rust server

Survival games you can host on Zeros Host today

Of the games above, you can spin up a managed server with us right now for:

• Rust - Oxide and Carbon support, wipe management, and the seed explorer tool.
• Project Zomboid - multiplayer survival with mods and co-op builds.
• Terraria - vanilla and tModLoader worlds.
• Minecraft - the original sandbox, with Paper, Fabric, Forge, Spigot, and Vanilla.

Each comes with the same panel, automatic backups, DDoS protection, and a 24-hour free trial so you can test real performance before you pay. See pricing for plans by game.

Games we do not host yet

Palworld, 7 Days to Die, and Satisfactory are not on Zeros Host yet. Palworld is on our roadmap - register your interest on the Palworld page. Valheim we do host - see our Valheim page for what the panel gives you and current pricing. s&box is a different case: it is not something we can host, since its dedicated server is not currently available in a form that can run on our infrastructure, and that is outside our control, so we are not taking interest registrations for it. For anything else, use the contact form to tell us what to add next - demand is genuinely how we decide.