24
votes
What are some fun games you can self-host?
I have a windows server with some spare capacity that I use to host some games for the community I'm a part of. Currently I host a couple TF2 servers and a wreckfest server. What other games can I host?
I liked chivalry back when it was popular, so I guess I should look into setting up a valheim server! Do you have a good guide for setting up a server?
Also, how do I get good at valheim lol.
As for how you get good, its pure practice honestly. I have no love for ultra hard games or Souls-likes, but I have beaten the game twice solo and three times with a group of 2-4 friends. You just get very good at parrying enemies, moving to avoid damage entirely, and effectively running away (and maybe jumping up on top of large rocks). If in doubt, bring extra arrows and try to fight from a distance.
Check out Pterodactyl - it's a docker-based orchestrator and web interface for game server admin. They've got dozens of community-built "eggs" to run all sorts of games.
The biggest community repository of eggs for pterodactyl is https://github.com/parkervcp/eggs, and is always accepting pull requests
Honestly at this point I had forgotten that the parkervcp eggs weren't part of a default install
I use Pterodactyl to manage my Minecraft server. It's perfect for that.
I have been using amp by cube coders but might look into that.
Valheim!.
Yes! Came here for this! My Viking brethren have since abandoned me. It was not joyful to wonder the afterlife alone.
Valheim is great fun and my friends and I have run through the game three times thus far and plan to return to it every time new content comes out.
OpenRA!
And while someone is mentioning notable "OpenXYZ" implementations:
What's this?
It's a faithful rebuild of the original Red Alert (and other Westwood Studios games) from the ground up using an open source game engine. It's pretty stable and better balanced than the original with support for modern quality of life improvements like high resolutions and attack move etc.
https://www.openra.net/
If you own the game (with all the assets), you can even play the original campaigns.
Factorio!
The factory must grow.
Also Satisfactory, which is similar but 3d
My group of friends typically spin up a Wolfenstein: ET server and a quake3 or Open Arena server (depending on if everyone owns the game) when we meet up around the holidays. That's always fun.
Terraria is a blast if you’ve never played. Lots of mod support as well if you want to spice things up.
I run two Conan Exiles private servers on a windows box, alongside a Linux machine running Pterodactyl and several other games (Valheim, Interstallar Rift, and Wurm). If you have any interest in giving those a go, I'd be happy to share advice on any of the things I learned "the hard way" during the initial setup!
Conan is a good one! It's not too hard to spin up in a Docker container. There's a decent image out there that takes care of most of the work. But I grew tired of playing it alone.
I tell you what, the experience of hosting a private Conan server of my own has been eventful. It was running pretty well on my Pterodactyl server on linux, but eventually it started crashing after a bit of activity. Turns out that it doesn't actually vibe all that well with Wine's memory limits, and no matter how I configured the Wine settings, it would crash when the container approached 8 gigs of memory usage. Eventually I just moved it to a Windows server I set up on an older laptop, and it's never had that problem again. Just in case you experience that as well!
I had it running in Docker in an Ubuntu VM in MacOS. Also how I've hosted Valheim. Works solidly but quite a bit of overhead.
Maybe I should dig up and share that docker-compose.
I'd be curious to know how your Conan server handles memory. I'm assuming the Docker container is still running wine, yes? Everyone else I've spoken with or read on forums has had issues with the 8g memory crash. If you have an image that doesn't crash when it hits that usage, I'd love to see it and try it on our Pterodactyl server.
Valheim has been just peaches, at least on the server end. Yeah, agreed on the overhead, I am really looking forward to their eventual full non-early-access stable release. I'm tired of the continual required mod overhaul, hah.
Check out SRB2 Kart. It's an open source kart racer built on a Sonic 3D platformer fangame, itself built on the Doom engine, with the excellent modding support that this entails. Hosting a server is extremely simple (... Other than sorting out the hundreds of mods you will inevitably want to add, but once that's done the game just distributes them to all the people connecting to your server GMod-style) and online multiplayer is actually pretty much the only way to play the game outside of a time attack mode.
OpenMW with the TES3MP component is a fun one I've been enjoying lately. It is not a perfect experience, but if you've ever wanted to play an Elder Scrolls game with friends, it's an experience that can't be beat.
This repo is filled with Docker files for a bunch of different game servers (each branch is a different game). They're made for Unraid, but should be a good starting point.
If you like WWII FPS games, and enjoyed bot play back in BF1942/BF2 check out:
Easy Red 2
It's a singleplayer campaign focused game, but you can host any mission and have your friends join, even public people too. It's a great spice-up to have a real person on the other team in an army of bots.
Funnily enough Marco the dev has just released his Normandy DLC which took his tiny team 9 months to make and it shows. All the classics like ALL the beaches, pegasus, vierville, carentan - it's really good and has a lot of unique features I won't spoil or go into too much detail with.
It's always dirt cheap and well worth your time. I use ER2 as a nice buffer little game when there's a couple of us on before we hit up our main game.
edit: sorry I think you mean dedicated server style games? Will leave it here anyway