Nine New Dedicated Servers, and the Game We Turned Down

Nine games went live on the platform on August 19, 2026, and a tenth was evaluated and turned down. Every one of the nine new dedicated servers has something the store page does not mention. Multiplayer that only exists as a community mod. A player cap no host can raise. A config file the game itself overwrites on patch day.

This is the roundup rather than nine separate announcements, the same shape as the eight games added the week before. Two of them earned a longer explanation. The other seven get a section each: what the game is, then the one or two things that decide whether your server behaves the way you expect.

The traps, up front:

• RimWorld has no official multiplayer at all. The shared planet comes from a community mod, and everyone needs the same one.
• SCP: Secret Laboratory is free to play, but the public server browser is a human review at Northwood, not a switch a host can flip.
• Holdfast hides the player cap inside every entry of the map rotation, in a file the game overwrites on patch day.
• Sniper Elite 4 clamps to 12 players however many you set, silently.
• Warband's official server download host no longer exists.

RimWorld multiplayer is a mod, and that changes what you are buying

Ludeon ships no multiplayer and no dedicated server for RimWorld. The shared planet people mean comes from RimWorld Together, a free open source mod. Its server is what we run for you.

Everyone lands on the same world map and keeps their own colony. You visit each other, trade pawns and goods, build roads and answer distress calls. It is not one colony played by several people at once. The simulation still runs on each player's machine, which makes this one of the lightest servers we host.

Two things are worth settling before anyone connects. The first player to join a fresh server generates the world everyone shares, so decide your mod list by then. And mods are not a flat rule here: the server marks each one required, optional or forbidden. A player missing a required mod is turned away at the join screen. Anything optional is left to the individual.

Storyteller, difficulty, scenario and the mod list are deliberately not panel fields. The mod takes those from the admin's own game and would overwrite anything we wrote to disk. So you connect once, set that name as the Admin Player Name, restart, and manage them in game. Everything the server genuinely owns is in the config editor. Plans run 2 to 20 slots, and our hosted RimWorld servers pin a specific RimWorld Together release and verify it by checksum.

The Starbound mod problem is a filename

Ask about running Frackin' Universe on a Starbound server and you will be told the Steam Workshop version does not work on one. The advice is sound. The explanation is usually missing, and it turns out to be one of the more fixable problems in hosting.

Every Starbound Workshop item publishes its payload as a file called contents.pak. Not the mod's name. Not an id. The same filename for all of them. Steam keeps them apart by giving each item its own numbered folder, where the name does not need to be unique.

A dedicated server does not read those folders. It reads one mods directory. So the fifth contents.pak copied across lands on top of the fourth, one mod loads, and people conclude the Workshop build is broken. The second half is subscriptions: a bare server has no Steam account subscribed to anything, so subscribing on your own PC puts no files on it.

Our picker downloads each item and files it under a name derived from its Workshop id. The collision cannot happen, so Frackin' Universe is one pick in the list like any small tweak. Your players still need the same mods in their own game, and a server setting decides whether someone without them is refused or let in with broken content. Chucklefish froze the server build in June 2019, so automatic updates ship off by default. Plans run 4 to 24 slots, Starbound servers are live now, and the Starbound setup guide covers the rest.

SCP: Secret Laboratory

Northwood ship a real dedicated server for SCP: Secret Laboratory, and the game is free to play. Everyone you invite needs nothing but a Steam install. Your server is playable the minute it deploys, through Servers and then Direct Connect with your address.

The public server browser is the part that catches people out. It is a review, not a setting. Getting listed means emailing Northwood's safety compliance address with your exact address and port, then waiting on a human. Verified servers are capped at 60 slots, and the verification lapses after 14 consecutive days offline. No host can grant it for you.

Admin is one number. Your SteamID64 goes in the panel and unlocks the in-game Remote Admin panel. There is no RCON and no join password in this game, so access control is a SteamID64 list. Plugins are LabAPI, Northwood's own framework, which ships with the server, plus EXILED on top of it. Both are files you upload. There is no Workshop here, so nobody can offer one-click mod installs. Our SCP: Secret Laboratory servers run 10 to 40 slots.

Holdfast: Nations At War

Anvil ship a free dedicated server tool for Holdfast: Nations At War, and it is genuinely good. It also has three sharp edges that catch everyone who self-hosts. We took all three off.

A game update overwrites the settings file. Holdfast keeps its configuration in a plain text file the game replaces on patch day. The official advice is to duplicate it under your own name or lose your setup. Every server here gets its own file, rebuilt from the panel on each start, so a patch cannot wipe it.

The player cap is not where you would look for it. It does not live in the server section at all. It sits inside every single entry of the map rotation, and a line battle rotation can carry a hundred entries. Your purchased slot count is written into all of them for you.

The rotation is the whole game. Holdfast plays a rotation rather than a single map, and there is no include statement, so it has to be pasted inline. The five rotations the build ships are a dropdown, and a regiment with its own can upload it and pick Custom. One last thing worth knowing: there is no external RCON. Admin happens in the in-game console with the password you set in the panel. Plans run 24 to 100 slots, with the detail in the Holdfast setup guide and the ordering on the Holdfast page.

MX Bikes

PiBoSo ships a real dedicated server with MX Bikes, and almost nobody hosts it. The reason is plain: it is not on Steam. The server lives inside the standalone game installer and needs no licence key of its own. That is PiBoSo's own position, not a workaround.

All fifteen stock tracks are there, across motocross, supercross, supermoto, enduro and Straight Rhythm. Three carry a second layout. A server holds up to ten in rotation and steps to the next at each restart. Run it as an open practice session, or as a full race weekend with practice, qualifying, warmup and two motos.

The settings league organisers argue about are all panel fields. Terrain deformation and whether it resets each session. A dynamic track surface that can persist between events. Weather, collisions with a ping cutoff, a rating-class gate, and the hardcore trio of forced cockpit view, no aids and limited tyre sets. Results and replays export straight to your FTP. Community tracks and bikes install on a hosted MX Bikes server the same way they install on a rider's PC, so everyone joining needs the same content. Plans run 10 to 40 slots.

No More Room in Hell

To be unambiguous about which game this is: No More Room in Hell is the original Source co-op zombie game, and it is free to play. It is not the 2026 sequel. The sequel ships no dedicated or community servers at all, so there is nothing to rent from anybody for that one.

Every server is eight players. That is the engine's ceiling, not a tier we picked. Launch it with more and the boot log clamps it back to eight without comment. All 34 official maps ship. There is no gamemode setting either, because the map prefix is the mode: nmo_ maps run Objective, nms_ maps run Survival.

The setting that matters most is difficulty, and it is not a number. It loads a ruleset, and the game ships casual, classic and nightmare. Zombie health, spawn density and how likely a bite is to turn you all live inside that file rather than in ordinary settings. Full Source RCON is included. Your server.cfg stays yours, because the panel rewrites only the lines it manages. Plans run 4 to 8 slots on the No More Room in Hell page, and the configuration reference lists the rest.

Sniper Elite 4

Rebellion's server tool has not been rebuilt since July 2017. Here that reads as a feature rather than a warning. The server, the client and the map list have been stable for eight years, so there is no version drift and no patch day where half your players cannot connect.

The number that surprises people is the cap. Sniper Elite 4 multiplayer stops at 12 players and the engine enforces it. Set 24 and the server comes up reporting 12, silently, with nothing in the log to say it clamped. Raising it on a running server is refused outright. So a 12 slot server is the whole game, and our tiers stop there.

Ten maps and eight modes are in the pool, with the mode set per rotation entry rather than server wide. The rule that catches people out is that four of the ten do not accept No Cross. A hand-built rotation carrying one of those pairs is quietly shortened without a word. The panel drops invalid pairs before they reach the server. Admin is Rebellion's own browser console, which they host themselves, so we point you at it and your panel carries the address, port and password. Sniper Elite 4 servers run 6 to 12 slots, and the joining guide covers the client side.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam

Tripwire and Antimatter's 64 player Vietnam shooter is the one game here still getting depot builds. Its server payload was rebuilt on August 6, 2026. All 35 shipped maps are there across Territories, Supremacy and Skirmish. Take a rotation preset or build your own cycle.

Round limits, team balance, friendly fire, voting, voice and roughly seventy other settings are labelled fields in the panel rather than lines in an ini file. That file is rewritten from your settings on every start, so nothing drifts.

The honest caveat is the browser admin panel. The game ships one, and on this build the engine sometimes rewrites its own config back to disabled with nothing to say it did. So we ship it off by default, label it experimental, and probe the socket before the panel prints a link. Turn it on and it works. We would rather say that plainly than advertise a panel that is occasionally not listening. Plans run 16 to 64 slots on the Rising Storm 2 page, and the joining guide has the menu path.

Mount & Blade: Warband

Warband came out in 2010 and its multiplayer never really stopped. Regiments have run the same weekly line battle for a decade. Persistent World servers have towns where people hold down jobs. cRPG has been accruing character progression since before most live service games existed. None of it runs on matchmaking.

What has got harder is finding the server. TaleWorlds shipped a standalone dedicated server, and unusually it does not need a copy of the game to run. But it was never distributed through Steam, and the download host it lived on no longer resolves at all. Anyone setting one up today starts by hunting for the package.

So we serve a verified copy of the final 1.174 release, pinned by checksum. That has a pleasant property in a game this age: a server set up today stays compatible indefinitely. All nine multiplayer modes are a dropdown, each arriving with the rotation TaleWorlds ship for it. Round length, respawn timing, friendly fire, combat speed and what your players may vote on are fields, not a hand-written script.

Modules work the way they always have, as self-contained folders you upload and name. Persistent World, cRPG and linebattle modules all install the same way. One honest note: this game has no query protocol at all. Player counts come from the server's own log, and joining is by direct address. Warband servers run 16 to 64 slots, and the joining guide covers adding it to your favourites.

The one we did not ship: Risk of Rain 2

Risk of Rain 2 was evaluated in the same wave and turned down. That is worth saying out loud, because it is still being sold elsewhere.

Gearbox emptied the dedicated server download. Ask Steam for it today and it reports the app fully installed, then hands over 1,392 bytes. Both of those are Steam's own bookkeeping files. Steam's metadata agrees this is deliberate rather than a transient failure, because the published manifest's size is zero. A provisioning run against that would succeed and give a paying customer an empty directory.

The hosts still listing it are serving an archived copy from before the removal, a build from May 2022. Playing on one means everybody in your group downgrading through the Steam developer console, and giving up two expansions to do it. That is a support queue rather than a product, so we did not build one. If the download comes back, we will revisit it.

What this means for your server

Three of the nine decide up front what your group has to install. RimWorld needs the same mod on every machine. Warband needs the same module. Starbound needs the same mods, or a server setting that lets people in without them. Settle that before the first person connects, because with RimWorld the first connection is what generates the world you all share.

Two more have a ceiling you cannot buy past. No More Room in Hell stops at eight and Sniper Elite 4 stops at twelve, both enforced by the game rather than by us. Slot counts advertised above those numbers are not something the game will honour.

All nine run on the same control panel, the same file manager and the same scheduled backups as everything else we host. The panel itself was rebuilt earlier this month. Each game has its own page with slot tiers and locations, and the full catalogue lists all of them.