Nomad Drive Dedicated Servers Are Live at Survival Servers

Nomad Drive is out in Early Access, and Survival Servers runs the full game. Nomad Drive has no dedicated server of its own, so we run the game itself on our hardware around the clock. Your server shows up in the game's own Join list, friends join it by name or with a 5-character code, and the trip keeps going when nobody is home.

What Nomad Drive is

Nomad Drive is a post-apocalyptic road trip survival game from Indie Devil. You repair a rundown RV, turn it into a home on wheels and drive a procedurally generated wasteland, scavenging parts, cooking, fishing and keeping the engine alive for as long as the road lets you. It plays solo or in online co-op for up to four players.

The full game arrived in Steam Early Access on October 27, 2026, after a free demo that ran from Next Fest in June. Steam counted 984 people in the full game at 8:45 PM Pacific on launch day, with about 600 more still in the demo.

The road at dusk. On a hosted server the trip is still there in the morning.

How Nomad Drive co-op normally works

Co-op is hosted from one player's game. That player creates the trip, the game lists it in the Join list or hands out a five-character code, and friends connect through Epic's online service. There is no port forwarding on anyone's end, which is the good part.

The catch is the same one every host-from-your-own-game co-op has. The trip exists only while the host has the game open. Close it and everyone is dropped. The save lives on the host's PC, so the group plays on that one person's schedule, and if the host is busy for a week the RV sits in their driveway for a week.

What our server does instead

A Survival Servers Nomad Drive server runs the full game on our hardware, with no player attached and no monitor, and keeps it running whether or not anyone is in the trip. It signs in to Epic's service on its own, creates the session, and appears in the game's Join list under the name you give it in the control panel. From a player's side it is indistinguishable from a friend hosting, except the friend never logs off.

The top of the server page in the panel: the name to find in the Join list and the code to type under Join by Code.

Players need nothing beyond the game. No launcher, no mod, no app, no address to type. That makes this the simplest join of any server we run for a game without an official one, and it is a different shape from Dimraeth, where every player installs the Waygate app, or How to Fish, where they install Driftwood. Here the game already knows how to find a session and join it, and the server is just always there to be found.

A few things worth knowing before you order, because we would rather say them here than in a support ticket:

• Everyone needs the full game. The free demo cannot join a server running the full game, because Nomad Drive only lets players join a trip on the exact same version.
• Demo trips carried over in our tests. The full game uses the same save format, and two demo trips, our lab copy and our test server's own, continued in the full game on the first start. We have not seen every customer's trip yet.
• Game updates come first, then the server. When Indie Devil ships an update, players who update first cannot join until the server is on the same version. We move servers to a new build once our host is proven on it, usually the same day.
• The Join list reads x/5. The game counts the server itself as a member of the session, so an empty server shows 1/5. Four people can join; the fifth slot is the server.
• Four seats is the ceiling. That is the game's own limit for a co-op trip and the server does not raise it.

What we saw running it

We built the server on the demo in September and moved every server to the full game on launch night. From a cold start it takes about twenty seconds to sign in, load the saved trip and show as hosting; a player who types the code is in the world about five seconds later. An empty server uses well under half of one CPU core, so it runs beside other game servers without crowding them.

The part we did not plan for: within a few hours of our first test server appearing in the public Join list, strangers had found it and were driving around in it. The Join list works exactly the way the game intends, which is the whole point, and it is also why the panel has a code-only switch: flip it and the server drops out of the public list and only people with the code can join.

The kitchen in the RV. The server saves the whole trip, fridge included, every five minutes and on every stop.

What is in the panel

The control panel is the same one every Survival Servers game uses, cut down to what this game actually has. The server name and join code sit at the top of the page with a Copy button.

Server Config holds the world name and seed (a new name starts a fresh trip and the old save stays on disk), the autosave interval, the public or code-only switch and the code itself. The Lock Password field sets the password the game asks for on join. The Players card lists who is in the trip and has Kick, Ban and Unban next to each name, and bans stick across restarts.

Saves happen on the server every five minutes and every time it stops, so there is no save button anywhere. Backups and restores run from the panel like every other game, and FTP gives you the save folder if you want it. Eight locations: Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Miami, Germany, France and Singapore.

The step-by-step for players is on the wiki: How to join a Nomad Drive server. It covers the Join list, Join by Code, the x/5 count and what to do when a freshly started server has not shown up in the list yet.

Why we built it

Nomad Drive is on the same list as Dimraeth, Grounded 2, Subnautica 2, Delverium and RedM: games people want to play together on their own terms, where the studio has not shipped a server. The same request kept turning up in its community through the demo: can the trip stay up when the host leaves. It can now, on the full game.

What this means for your server

If you have been playing with friends and taking turns hosting, a server ends the turn-taking. Order one, name the trip, hand out the code, and the RV is there whenever anyone wants to drive. Nomad Drive server hosting is live at all eight locations with up to four seats, and the server is hosting about a minute after checkout.