Endless Sky

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 766 words

There is nothing to self-host in Endless Sky. It is a single-player desktop game, 512 MB of RAM, no accounts, no online component, no server binary, and it appears in a self-hosting directory because people who run their own everything tend to ask "what about games". The honest answer is that this one belongs in the same category as a good text editor: a GPL-3.0 program you install on the machines you own, whose files you keep, and which no company can switch off. What follows is how that fits into a home setup, and what it is not.

What the game is, in one paragraph

A top-down 2D space sandbox in the lineage of Escape Velocity: buy a ship, haul cargo, take missions, fight pirates, upgrade, and follow story arcs that unfold across a few hundred star systems. It has been in development since 2015, sits at 7,531 stars, runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows from the same C++ codebase, and is free with no purchase and no in-game economy of any kind. It is on Steam and GOG for convenience and also as a Flatpak and a plain download from the project site, which is the version a self-hoster will prefer because nothing phones home.

Your save files are the only state, so sync them

Everything persistent lives in one directory: on Linux ~/.local/share/endless-sky/, with saves/ for pilots and plugins/ for community content. Windows and macOS use their equivalent application data folders. Saves are plain text and small, a few hundred kilobytes each, which makes them a perfect fit for Syncthing: share the saves folder between a desktop and a laptop and you continue the same pilot on either machine with no cloud save service involved. Sync only saves, not the whole directory, so a half-copied plugin on one machine cannot corrupt the other. If two machines write the same pilot before sync catches up, Syncthing keeps a conflict copy and you pick one; the game itself has no merge logic.

Plugins are the reason people keep playing

Endless Sky's content is data files, and a plugin is a folder of the same kind of data files dropped into plugins/. Community plugins add ship packs, new story arcs, entire galaxies, and quality-of-life changes, and the good ones are the size of a small expansion. They are distributed as Git repositories and zip files, which means the self-hoster's habit of cloning things onto a NAS applies directly: keep the plugins you use in a folder under version control or plain backup, because plugin authors abandon projects and a favourite mod vanishing from GitHub is the only way this game can lose content. There is an in-game plugin browser in recent versions, but the files still land in the same folder either way.

A game library server can serve it to the household

If several people in the house play, GameVault or Gameyfin will index a folder of installers and let each machine pull the current build, which keeps everyone on the same version without each person visiting the download page. That is the entire "self-hosted" story for Endless Sky: an installer on a share, saves in Syncthing, plugins in a backed-up folder. There is no dedicated server to run, no multiplayer to host, and no matchmaking to replace, and the project has said single-player is by design.

Where it sits among open source games

For a self-hoster the interesting comparisons are the other GPL games that also need no server. Pioneer is the 3D, Elite-style space sim for people who want a cockpit view; Naev is the closest sibling, another Escape Velocity descendant with a stronger writing focus and a smaller ship roster. OpenTTD and Luanti are the ones with real dedicated servers if what you actually wanted was something to host for friends. The games category splits those out.

What I'd do

Install from the project's own download or Flatpak rather than Steam, put saves/ in a Syncthing share across the machines you play on, and keep the plugins you rely on in a folder your regular backup already covers. If you want a game you can host as a service for other people, Endless Sky is not it; run OpenTTD or Luanti for that. If you want a free, offline game that will still work in 10 years with no account, this is one of the best ones available.