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Valheim server requirements

A Valheim dedicated server is undemanding by modern standards, and the specification that matters is not the one most people check. The player cap is ten and cannot be raised, so the size of your world — how much has been built and how far it has been explored — is what decides the plan, not how many friends are joining.

The figures below are for the dedicated server only. Players run the game on their own machines and need nothing from the host beyond a reachable address.

Memory

4 GB minimum, 8 GB for a mature world

The one that actually decides things. A fresh world with a few players sits comfortably in 4 GB; a long-running world with large bases, many tamed creatures and a widely explored map climbs steadily towards 8 GB and does not come back down. Mods add to this rather than replacing it: a build-heavy world running a terrain modifier and a storage overhaul is a different proposition from a vanilla one.

Processor

2 cores, clock speed over core count

Valheim’s server is not heavily multi-threaded, so a fast pair of cores beats a slow four. Adding cores past two buys very little; the world simulation runs where it runs. This is why a cheap VPS with many weak vCores often performs worse than a smaller machine with a modern one.

Disk

10 GB, plus room for backups

The game itself is around 2 GB and a world file is tens to a few hundred megabytes. The reason to ask for more is backups: hourly archives accumulate, and a retention window of a few days on a large world is the part that grows. Disk is the cheapest of the three to over-provision.

Players

10, and that is a hard ceiling

Iron Gate caps a Valheim server at ten players. No host can raise it, and any plan sold as "20 slots" for Valheim is selling you hardware under a slot label. Size by the world, not by the group. See below.

Network

UDP 2456–2458, low latency

Three consecutive UDP ports: the game port, the Steam query port on game+1, and the crossplay port on game+2. A server missing the query port runs perfectly and never appears in the browser; a server missing the crossplay port works for Steam players while Xbox and Game Pass players cannot join at all. Bandwidth is modest; latency to your players is what they feel.

Operating system

Linux or Windows, 64-bit

Iron Gate ship a dedicated server for both. Linux is the usual choice for a hosted server because it costs less to run and the container images are better maintained; nothing about the world files is platform-specific, so a world moves between them unchanged.

Size by the world, not the group

Almost every other game sells hosting by slots because, for those games, players are what consume the machine. Valheim does not work that way. The server simulates the world continuously — structures, tamed creatures, dropped items, and every zone anyone has loaded — whether ten people are online or none.

The practical consequence is that two players on a world you have been building for a year will need more memory than ten players on a world generated this morning. If you are choosing between tiers, the question to ask yourself is how long you expect the world to live, not how many people are in the group.

It also means a plan advertised with a slot count is telling you nothing useful about Valheim. Ten is the ceiling everywhere. What differs between hosts is the RAM, the processor and whether backups are included.

The three ports

Valheim needs three consecutive UDP ports, and the two beyond the game port are the source of most “my server is broken” reports that turn out to be a configuration gap.

2456 is the game port — the one players type. 2457 is the Steam query port, which is how the server advertises itself; without it the server runs, direct connections work, and it never appears in the community browser. 2458 is the crossplay port, and without it Steam players connect normally while Xbox and Game Pass players cannot join at all.

If your server is running but nobody can find it, the troubleshooting page works through the causes in the order that finds it fastest.

What mods change

Mods cost memory, and they compound with the world rather than replacing its cost. A handful of quality-of-life plugins is close to free; a terrain modifier, a storage overhaul and a content pack together on a mature world is the case that outgrows a small plan.

Neither mod loader changes the hardware requirement by itself — running a modded server covers which loader to pick and what each player has to install.

Every plan here meets the requirements above

All three tiers publish the three ports, include hourly world backups and run crossplay by default. They differ on memory and processor — which, for Valheim, is the only thing worth differing on.

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