How to Host an ARK: Survival Ascended Server For FREE

today I'm going to teach you how to make an arc survival ascended server for free if you don't want to use a server provider as a solution to your hosting needs then I'm going to show you in this video basically how to uh go ahead and just host one off your PC now keep in mind you're going to have to need uh you're going to need a pretty beefy uh PC to do this if you're going to play on the same computer that you're running the server off of uh it's going to use probably upwards of at most 16 GB of RAM for the server itself alone let alone the game if you're going to run it off the same machine so just keep that in mind and uh you'll also need to you know have a pretty good CPU to be able to allocate the amount of cores that the server may need uh but you know we'll get into that later on so the first step is um make sure you're on Windows this is a Windows guide currently there is no Linux support so this is really just a guide for how to run a server on Windows and basically how to set up your inii settings and all that so let's get started first uh head on over to your Google or whatever your web browser search for steam search for steam CMD going to click on this right here the valve developer Community uh head on down to download Steam CMD for Windows click this button and you got your uh you got your thing right here steam cmd.exe you can close out of this let's make a folder here we're going to call this steam CMD all right go inside the folder we're going to put this exe into the folder we're going to double click on the exe and it's going to run this now you just want to wait for it to basically download all these updates um it's essentially installing the uh necessary files for steam CMD to function and it's basically dumping them all into this folder right here all right uh it might take a second but once that's done all you need to do is type log in Anonymous just like that A N A or o n y m o u s it's going to connect you anonymously to the steam Network now uh what you're going to do is type appcore update and then you're going to basically look for the uh I'm pulling it up right here just cuz I forgot the ID but we're going to use this app ID because this is the arc survival sended dedicated server so we're going to do 2 43093 so appcore update and then space and then 243 0930 space validate all right hit enter now it's going to download the server files uh for ASA now I think this is I don't know how big this is let's see but it shouldn't be too much it shouldn't be too large because really the the server files for for ASA are not anywhere near as large as the actual game itself you know cuz the server doesn't have to to install the the textures it doesn't have to install any of the actual the displays of the game right it's just downloading basically the framework for how all of the backend stuff works with the game and the way it's coded and everything as well as like the network stuff right and how it handles servers and players and all that it's really not so much to download in fact if we check Steam CMD right now it hasn't actually installed yet as you can see it's still waiting so you're going to see this downloading uh fill up basically and um once that's done uh we'll proceed so I'm just going to skip to one that's done all right so as you can see it is done now so once it says success app 24 30930 fully installed you can just type quit hit enter it's going to close now you want to navigate into the steam apps folder inside your steam CMD folder you go to common arc survival send a dedicated server and then shooter game binaries win 64 all right so now once you're in this folder you go to new um um text document and you can just call this uh start server. bat for example now make sure that whenever you create this file um if it says if you change the file name say extension it may be unstable click yes but if it doesn't say that and it's still a text file make sure that you uh are on view here and then you click on file name extension make sure that's checked so that you can see the uh the actual extension and then if it says do b.txt at the end just remove the. txt and it'll change the file type all right now uh left click then right click on it go to edit all right and from here I'm going to have something in the description and you're just going to paste this in so it's going to be start Arc ascended server.exe the island WP session name uh I'll have something else in here like um example example name server password you can make this um you know Apple for example what whatever you want alt save directory name uh we're just going to call this the island okay max players we can say let's say 70 just as an example server admin password this is if you want an admin password you don't have to have one and in fact you can get rid of this entire part right here if you don't want an admin password but um let's say this is we'll make this one 12 three okay now I can keep the rest the same so we're going to go ahead and just save this and then close out and then double click on this bat file right here and from here it's going to open this little thing right here now if you get this uh thing right here make sure you you I don't to be honest I'm on I'm like no expert but I usually just check both of these U just to allow the ports just to allow firewall to Not freak out so I would just check both of these and then click allow access now I could be totally mistaken I don't think it really matters in this case but yeah I just click that and then it's like great okay we're done so now we've launched the ASA server and it's uh I don't know if it's up yet I think it's starting up if I check my task manager uh 21 GB of my 32 in this PC are being used um so and and if I had to guess I'd have to say that that is probably largely due to the ASA server yeah ASA is taking about 10 GB right now so there you go um I think it may be up right now full startup it says so we'll go ahead and check and see if we can join the server so I'm going to show you how to actually join the server now that you've started it up and this is going to be for how to join it locally so I'm going to click uh start go to unofficial we're going to have check password protect show password protected on because if you recall the uh the bat file we used wrong one we set the password in the command line we have question mark server password equals Apple uh now we didn't use quotation for this so that may be a problem but um we'll see so the server name itself we call it example name all right now as you can see I searched for it and it's here on the unofficial server list now if you don't see it chances are you have one of these options selected that's going to mess with it right so you're filtering out um make sure you've got the right filter on that aren't going to hide this and make sure you've got you know for example if I don't have this checked it's not going to show it because it does have a password so now I'm going to click join I'm going to type I'm going to type in the password which I believe was um apple right so we'll type apple and we'll join the server now uh it's very important to mention to keep in mind that right now this server is being hosted off um my machine I am not Port forwarded on my router and so what that means is that even though firewall may allow people to uh join my router is not allowing people to join right now um because the way that routers work right which is basically your network uh box for your home more or less that's a grossly simplified way to put it um but the way that it works is you know it accepts certain protocols or or ports um certain ports from the internet um both in and out and and by default video game server ports are not always opened generally they're they're they have to be open deliberately and so we can talk about port foring in just a second but just to show you that we're on the server no I'm not the one you've been wait please skip okay so here we are in Game and as you can see we're on the server if we press Escape we see example name so this is the server that's running off my machine and now if we go to Ram yeah as you can see you're going to need at least 32 gig or more to be running the game and a server at the same time this is extremely taxing on my PC and let alone I mean the fact that I'm also recording at the same time probably not the best idea so um I would not recommend this but uh there you go so that's how we joined the server and then you know if we wanted to enable admin commands we have set up a thing in the right we have the server admin password all right so if you're if you're going to use admin commands you can type enable Pats space in the console and then 1 2 3 which is the password we set now if we type in chat we have a oh or notat GCM oh okay I guess it just didn't show the star for some reason but I do have cheat mode on right so now I've just entered GCM and and you know if you're familiar with commands this is uh may or may not be useful to you um if you're a dirty cheater I'm looking at you um but regardless uh you know whatever you need to use it for that's that's just one of the few inii commands that they've managed to add into ASA uh which is surprising because most of them are actually missing from ASC so that's how you you know set up and join the server and everything now let's talk a little bit about por forwarding oh and also I should mention that to close the server it's actually pretty simple uh if you just click on this x button it's pretty much just going to save and close itself generally it should save and everything should be fine that's how it worked in ASC um but if you want to be extra safe if you have enabled cheats on you type uh cheat space save world and then cheat space do exit uh do exit is like just one word and that'll just force it to shut down but okay let's talk about port forwarding now so more or less I'm just going to really quickly break this down so port forwarding um is basically the process of opening up uh some specific ports on your router right and so let's say this is this is the internet all right we'll put a giant eye on it okay and when and let's say this is your router okay so generally if you have internet you probably have a router in your house uh if you don't you have a pretty unique maybe mildly unique situation um and you really shouldn't be hosting a server in the first place if you don't have a router you can't really do that uh generally but let's say this is your router now when the internet right which let's say has some Arc players so you got you got an arc player right here um they try and join and let's say you know you got your Arc server here right as all right this is your Arc server um it's going to it's connected to you know it's running on your PC and it's going to the router and it's saying okay so if firewall is permitting it which is what we kind of allowed earlier when we first ran the server then it's going to say all right so we're running on these specific ports in the example I used in the batch file we use 7777 and 27015 right but then when someone tries to join which they need to join basically using the ports that you you that you set up um if the router does not want to let them in it can say nope you're blocked okay you're not coming in right um and that's obvious a problem so everyone has generally different routers and you're going to have to look up you're going to have to figure out what your router is and then um look up how to port forward on it right and then you just want to port forward the ports uh 777 this should be a UDP Port right and then also port forward uh 27015 for example uh which I believe is TCP and uh you know I'm not showing you how to do this on mine because I I don't even know how to do do it on mine at this point mine is uh I I've changed routers and I don't even run servers off my own um from my own place anymore used to do that a lot uh when I was younger but not anymore so once you figured out how to port forward and you've confirmed that it's working from there you can basically um people should be able to join your server right now because I'm not B forward and no one can actually join my server from outside the internet or from you know on the internet if it was over land they could join now the last thing we should talk about is um basically how to configure your server right because if you've done done everything right so far and you've Port forwarded and you've got that sorted out you might be wondering okay how do I configure the server so let's talk a little bit about that so if you head back to this shooter game folder which again is in Steam CMD steam apps common Arc dedicated server shooter game head on over to uh this saved folder and then go into config and Windows Server now there's a glaring issue currently with Asa which is that a lot of the ini uh essentially ini parameters right that Arc survival evolved use a lot of these parameters uh don't really exist anymore in ASA or they were changed or something weird happened right so if you go to the the official wiki you can actually see some of these that have been tested and some of them just a lot of them have like an X or a question mark next to them a lot of these parameters as you can see don't work like either they haven't been tested or straight up just yeah and and and that's a problem right and and what what are parameters you might be asking well these are things like you know oh allow anyone baby imprint cuddle specific settings things that allow you to tailor how your server works right some of these good chunk of them just are not found in Asa do not function and it's not very clear why some of them do or do not work um probably they just ran out of time and I'm hoping that they really sort of kick into action here and and get those in game because there's a lot of them that are missing especially pretty important ones like Whit list and so on um but some of the basic ones you can use for example are you know uh Harvest amount multiplier right and so you want to go to this official wiki page I'll link in the description right and then find the specifically you know well in this example let's use the game user settings.ini so that's going to be let's see are we in that Harvest amount yep so we can see same see same option in game user settings I so Harvest amount multiplier this goes in the game user settings I so we're going to open that back up um we're going to open this up here and then we're going to hit enter create a new line this is going to go under these server settings sort of category specifically some things go under different categories so just keep that in mind um just make sure you got the right thing in the right in the right file in the right category but then we do Harvest amount equals and you know the wiki says default value equals 1 value type is a float right which means that it's basically like a you know 1.0 2.0 3 4 Etc 34 um right so we can set this to like 100 and then save it and that means that the Harvest multiplier is now 100 on the server now um not all commands like I said go in game user settings I I and not all of them go in game. I I um but some of them of course do so for example some of those might be um let's see baby mature speed multiplier all right so this one as you can see it goes in the game.ini so I'm going to copy this one and game.ini doesn't even for some reason it's not even created uh when the server runs anymore I'm not really sure why that is so I guess we're going to have to make our own I'm going to open this and with the game.i you'll notice that we don't have a uh like a category here so we need to make sure that we add this right here so this is going to essentially clarify what this settings I don't know it clarifies a thing all the following options can only be set in the so it's setting it in this game mode or whatever right just includeed on the first line and then baby mature speed multiplier equals and then let's say 100 right so that means that babies are going to mature at 100 times a speed so that's the basic idea of how to do it and if that if I explain that too fast I do apologize um this is fairly common knowledge for you know for myself and a lot of other people who set up servers um and there's other ways of going about setting up servers like there's server um managers and stuff um but not a lot of those tools exist yet for ASA and so I'm just used to doing it kind of this raw kind of you know Bare Bones way and it's not too hard really so that's pretty much how you configure your server um and just keep in mind that uh changing settings while the server is actually online um if you close the server it's even if you save the file after you change it it closing the server actually writes to the file the same thing that it started with when it launched I believe um unless they fixed that so just be mindful of that don't change your settings until you've actually shut down the server because it'll straight up like delete what you actually change once you do shut it down um so just keep that in mind but otherwise that's pretty much it for how to set up your server if you found this guide useful uh click the like button below share it around to your friends uh anyone who may find this useful and let me know if you have any questions in the comments below happy to uh share my own expertise and comments and and all that if you'd like to instead of setting up your server play on one uh you can actually join the cluster that I run for ASA now called United Republic of Arc it is gated and it is only for patrons and YouTube members so keep that in mind but if you want to come join us I'll leave a link in the description below to the Discord come pop in otherwise thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye [Music] everyone

Channel: NeddyTheNoodle

Views: 17,179

Keywords: ark survival evolved, ark, ark story, ark full lore, ark full lore explained, ark story explained, ark ascended gameplay, ark survival ascended new, ark survival ascended pc requirements, ark ascended release, ark survival ascended servers, ark ascended how to host, ark ascended hosting, ark ascended server, is ark worth buying?, ark how to create server, how to create ark ascended server, ark how to create a server guide, ark server guide, ark ascended server settings

Id: 7XvtHlfpj4Y

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023