Operator notes
Game-server hardware sizing: RAM, CPU, and storage per player count
Most "minimum requirements" pages list the floor you can boot under, not what you actually need to run a healthy 24/7 server. Here are the honest numbers from operators who have watched the OOM killer trigger at 3am.
The shape of the problem
Game servers are not a uniform workload. A 4-player Valheim world fits in 4 GB of RAM. A 70-player Conan Exiles Enhanced world with mods needs 18 GB. The same machine that hosts both gets very different demands depending on which one is running.
The variables that actually drive sizing:
- Player count at peak, not average. The kernel does not care about your average.
- World size and persistence model. A procedural world streamed in chunks (Valheim, Vintage Story) loads more state into memory as players spread out. A loaded world (Counter-Strike 2 maps, V Rising) has a more bounded footprint.
- Mods. A vanilla Project Zomboid server uses 4 GB. A Build 42 server with the popular overhaul mods can hit 12 GB before any players join.
- Tick rate and simulation density. A factory-builder server with 30 production lines each ticking 10 times per second is a different CPU profile from a sandbox where most game state is dormant.
RAM by genre and player count
These numbers are for vanilla servers; add 30-100% if you run a heavy mod stack. RAM is the single most common reason a game server falls over.
| Game genre | 4 players | 10 players | 30 players | 70 players |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Survival co-op (Valheim, Soulmask, Core Keeper) | 4 GB | 6-8 GB | 12-16 GB | n/a (cap) |
| Survival sandbox (Palworld, Vintage Story) | 6 GB | 10-12 GB | 16-20 GB | 24-32 GB |
| Survival horror (7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid) | 4 GB | 8 GB | 16 GB | n/a (cap) |
| Open-world MMO-ish (Conan Exiles Enhanced, ARK Survival Ascended) | 8 GB | 12 GB | 16-20 GB | 20-32 GB |
| Voxel sandbox (Minecraft Java, Vintage Story) | 3 GB | 4-6 GB | 8-12 GB | 16+ GB |
| Factory / colony sims (Factorio, Necesse) | 4 GB | 6 GB | 10-12 GB | n/a (rarely above 30) |
| Competitive shooters (CS2, Insurgency Sandstorm) | 2 GB | 3 GB | 4-6 GB | n/a (cap) |
"n/a (cap)" means the engine itself does not support that player count on a single instance. You would shard or run parallel servers.
CPU: cores vs frequency
Most modern game servers benefit from high single-thread frequency more than from many cores. The exception is voxel and chunk-streaming engines (Minecraft, Vintage Story, 7 Days to Die) which can use 4-6 cores effectively for chunk generation, and survival sandboxes with heavy AI populations (Palworld, ARK) which spread AI ticks across cores.
| Profile | What it looks like | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| Single-thread bound | Factorio, V Rising, CS2, most sandbox sims | Modern CPU at 4 GHz+ all-core boost. Older Xeons hurt here. |
| Multi-thread friendly | Minecraft (Paper, Folia), Vintage Story, 7 Days to Die, Palworld | 4-8 cores at 3.5 GHz+. AMD EPYC or Ryzen 9 are both fine. |
| I/O bound | Worlds with frequent autosaves on slow disks | NVMe SSD, not the CPU. CPU sits at 30% while saves stall. |
If your provider advertises core count without frequency, ask. A 16-core 2.3 GHz Xeon Gold runs your Valheim server worse than a 4-core 4.5 GHz consumer Ryzen.
Storage: NVMe is not optional anymore
Game servers do small frequent writes during autosave. Spinning rust (HDD) handles the writes but stutters every save interval, freezing players for 1-3 seconds at a time. SATA SSD is acceptable. NVMe is what you actually want.
Storage capacity per game (vanilla, single world):
- Survival co-op (Valheim, Core Keeper): 1-3 GB world + 2-4 GB game files
- Survival sandbox (Palworld, Vintage Story): 5-15 GB world + 30-60 GB game files
- Conan Exiles Enhanced: 8-20 GB world + 80 GB game files (UE5 build)
- ARK Survival Ascended: 5-15 GB world + 120 GB game files
- Minecraft Java: highly variable; 1 GB to 100+ GB depending on map exploration
Add 50-100% headroom for backups, the second world you forgot you had, and the mod folder.
Realistic minimum 24/7 box for a 10-player friend group: 16 GB RAM, modern 6-core CPU at 4 GHz+, 256 GB NVMe. Covers most popular games with vanilla mods. The same box becomes uncomfortable around 20 players or with a heavy mod stack; that is when paid hosting starts winning on cost-per-player-hour.
Network: less than you think, until it is more
Bandwidth per player is small for most game-server traffic (50-150 KB/s upload per active player for survival, higher for shooters). The number that matters is the upload tier on your home internet, since that is the constraint when self-hosting.
- 4 players, vanilla survival: 1 Mbps upload is enough.
- 10 players, survival with mods: 5-10 Mbps upload.
- 30 players, anything: 25 Mbps upload minimum, 50 Mbps preferred.
- Competitive shooters at any size: latency matters more than bandwidth; sub-30ms ping to your players, not raw Mbps.
Residential cable internet typically caps at 10-35 Mbps upload; fiber starts at 50 Mbps and goes up. Below 25 Mbps upload, distant players will see lag spikes during high-action moments regardless of how good your CPU is.
Practical sizing recipe
- Pick your game and your peak player count.
- Look up the RAM number above. Round up to the nearest 4 GB.
- Multiply by 1.5 if you run any mod stack. Multiply by 2 if it is a heavy overhaul mod (Darkness Falls, Age of Calamitous, Better than Wolves).
- Pick a CPU based on the genre profile (single-thread vs multi-thread).
- NVMe storage at least 2x the world+game-files footprint to leave room for backups.
- Confirm your upload tier matches the player count.
If any of those numbers doesn't fit on the hardware you have, you have your answer for the self-host vs managed question.