How to set up a dedicated server for “The Forest”

Want to play “The Forest” together with friends, and enjoy maximum freedom for con­fig­u­ra­tion and mods in game? A hosted server is the best solution for this. If you have the necessary hardware, you can easily install the server ap­pli­ca­tion of this open-world survival game via SteamCMD.

A community server for joint online ad­ven­tures in “The Forest” can basically also be hosted on your own PC at home. However, if you want to join the game yourself later, this is not rec­om­mend­ed from a per­for­mance point of view. In addition, the internet con­nec­tion in house­holds is rarely suf­fi­cient to guarantee a smooth gaming ex­pe­ri­ence. Another reason for hosting the game at a provider: As soon as you shut down your device, the “The Forest” server is offline as well.

The re­quire­ments of hosting “The Forest” on a dedicated server can be sum­ma­rized as follows:

• Computing power (CPU): 2 players: min. 2.4 GHz (2 cores); 3+ players: min. 3.0 GHz (4 cores)
• RAM: 2 players: min. 3 gigabytes; 3+ players: min. 4 gigabytes
• Hard disk space: min. 10 gigabytes

If you want to use ad­di­tion­al mod­i­fi­ca­tions, you have to plan for more resources, es­pe­cial­ly if you increase the default maximum player count of 8 in this way.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, consider the computing power you need for the operating system. You can choose between the server operating systems from Microsoft and the typical Linux server systems like Ubuntu.

Hosting options for gaming servers can be found at a wide variety of providers. At IONOS, for example, you can choose between three models with different packages (scope and costs), which differ in their ar­chi­tec­ture, but all guarantee a broadband con­nec­tion of up to 400 Mbit/s.

The server cat­e­gories that IONOS offers for hosting a “The Forest” server are as follows.:

• Cloud server: Vir­tu­al­ized server resources billed by the minute
• vServer: Vir­tu­al­ized server resources at a fixed monthly price
• Dedicated server: Dedicated en­ter­prise hardware; per-minute billing

Here, you’re given the choice between vir­tu­al­ized server resources, which you share with other customers, and dedicated hardware, which IONOS reserves only for you. In both cases, however, you can be sure that you will always have the booked per­for­mance ca­pac­i­ties at your disposal.

The decisive dif­fer­ence between cloud servers and vServers lies in the billing. With a cloud server, you only pay at the end of the month for the service that you have actually used. Customers who opt for a vServer always pay a fixed monthly price.

The price for dedicated servers, which are also billed on a per-minute basis, is generally higher than the prices for vServers and cloud servers, as the focus here is on high-per­for­mance en­ter­prise hardware.

Exactly how much computing power and storage space you need, and which server type or plan is best suited to you depends mainly on how you want to use your “The Forest” server. Are you planning to have many users and mods? And do you need the hardware ex­clu­sive­ly to run “The Forest” dedicated server? The table below shows three possible scenarios and the cor­re­spond­ing IONOS plans.

You can start with the in­stal­la­tion and setup of your own “The Forest” server as soon as you have the ap­pro­pri­ate server hardware ready. In the following, we will show you the in­di­vid­ual steps. The in­struc­tions are exemplary from the per­spec­tive of IONOS customers (vServer, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server). Windows Server is used as the operating system.

The quick and easy solution to download and install the server software is via SteamCMD. This tool is the official command line client of the Steam gaming platform. Simply download the following SteamCMD in­stal­la­tion package and unzip it into any directory. Then double-click SteamCMD.exe to install the program.

Using the command line client, you can now connect to the public Steam servers and obtain the dedicated server software of “The Forest”. To do this, start the program by right-clicking and first type the following command for an anonymous login to the public Steam servers:

In the second step, you create a directory where the server ap­pli­ca­tion will be installed, for example C:\the-forest-dedicated-server:

Finally, download the software by combining the “app_update” command with the app ID of “The Forest” dedicated server (556450):

After suc­cess­ful in­stal­la­tion, log out of the Steam servers using the command “quit”.

Now you can take care of the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the server. “The Forest” uses the Server.cfg file for this, which is au­to­mat­i­cal­ly generated the first time you start The­For­estDed­i­cat­ed­Serv­er.exe. So first call up the directory where you installed the server and start the .exe-file by double-clicking it.

Wait a moment and then close the window again (it’ll open au­to­mat­i­cal­ly). You will find the con­fig­u­ra­tion file in the following directory: