Veloren

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 870 words

The rule that decides whether your Veloren server works is version lockstep: the client and server must be built from the same release, and the game ships weekly builds that players get through the Airshipper launcher. Run a server on an old build and your friends on the current one cannot connect, with an error that does not say why. Everything else about hosting Veloren is ordinary; that one detail is why people give up. Pin your server image to the same channel your players use, update on a schedule they know about, and it is a pleasant free game to host for a group of 5 to 20 people.

Pick a channel and stay on it

Veloren does not have a stable release cadence in the way a finished game does. It is a free, open-source voxel RPG that has been in active development since 2018, and the practical release train is the weekly build. The official Docker image is published with tags for that train, and the players' launcher defaults to the same one, so the combination that works is:

services:
  veloren:
    image: registry.gitlab.com/veloren/veloren/server-cli:weekly
    ports:
      - "14004:14004"
      - "14005:14005"
    volumes:
      - ./userdata:/opt/userdata
    restart: unless-stopped

Port 14004 carries the game protocol and 14005 exposes metrics, which is handy for graphing player counts. Tell your group "the server updates Saturday morning" and update the image then; the launcher will have pulled the matching client for them by the time they log in. The alternative is to have everyone build from a fixed git commit, which works for a fixed friend group and nobody else.

The resource budget is not a Pi job

The 2 GB minimum in the catalogue is a real minimum, not a comfortable one. World generation is the expensive part: the first start of a new world computes terrain, rivers, settlements and caves for the whole map, and on a modest quad-core that takes several minutes and a spike of memory well beyond idle. Afterwards, simulation cost scales with loaded chunks, which scales with how spread out the players are. Five players clustered together sit around a core and 2 to 3 GB; fifteen players exploring in different directions can push a mid-range server hard. If you are choosing between a small VPS and a home box with a spare desktop CPU, the home box wins for this game; single-thread performance matters more than core count.

Persistence and the RON settings file

Everything lives under the userdata folder: server/settings.ron for server options, a saves directory with the SQLite database that holds characters and inventories, and the world files. RON is Rust's object notation, readable and picky about trailing commas; edit it with the server stopped. The settings you will actually touch are the server name, the maximum player count, the world seed if you want a fresh map, and the admin list. Back up the userdata folder before every weekly update. Database migrations on updates have been reliable, but a game in active development is exactly the kind of software where "reliable so far" is the honest phrasing, and a 50 MB copy costs nothing.

What it is like to run compared with Minecraft

Veloren is smaller in every dimension than the Minecraft ecosystem: no plugin marketplace of the Paper and Spigot kind, no mod loaders, no rented-hosting industry, and a community that is enthusiastic but a fraction of the size. What you get instead is a game that is entirely free for everyone you invite, no account purchases, and an engine in Rust that behaves well under load. A group choosing between the two on cost alone lands here; a group that wants years of mods and a survival sandbox lands on the Minecraft alternatives page or on Luanti, which is the open-source sandbox with the closest feel. Veloren is an RPG with quests, dungeons, crafting and a world that exists before you arrive, closer to the Cube World idea than to block building, and that shapes who it is for.

Where it fits in a game-hosting setup

If you already run a panel like Pterodactyl, a community egg for Veloren exists and the weekly-update workflow fits its scheduler well. Without a panel, the compose file above and a cron line to pull and restart on the chosen day is all the automation you need. The games category covers the other servers people run alongside, and Veloren coexists happily with them as long as the RAM budget is honest.

What I'd do

Host it on a home machine with at least 4 GB free and a decent desktop CPU, on the weekly image, updated every Saturday with a backup of the userdata folder first. Cap players at 20, let the world generate overnight before the first session, and expose the metrics port to whatever graphing you already run. Tell players to use Airshipper and nothing else. Treat the game as what it is, an ambitious project still being built, and it delivers a free multiplayer RPG that is a genuine pleasure to hand to a group.