Text wall incoming…
The main thing I wish I knew when I first started Conan Exiles, was how easy it is to run your own dedicated server. This thread is going to outline my experience “growing” into Conan. Hopefully some others can learn something from it.
I first started playing Conan Exiles when the “enhanced” version was launched. I had not played it before then. Most of the games I played for the last decade or more all had no need for a “server” the way the games back in the day needed them. (the way conan does) However, since PVP games are all over-run with cheaters and exploiters, it was no longer possible for me to have fun playing them and I wanted a different more chill experience.
When Conan Exiles Enhanced launched, it looked like just the ticket. I have over 650 hours in the game since then, and while the sheer number of bugs makes me want to uninstall it constantly… rumors of many of them getting fixed in the beta branch makes me hang in here to see what the next couple updates look like.
So, when I started playing, I began a single player character. I played for a couple hours, and realized that this is EXACTLY the kind of game I was looking for. So I fired up co-op and invited a couple friends to play. We were quickly disappointed by the “tether” that didn’t allow anyone to go more than a grid square away from the host. Though we struggled through it for a while, building some pretty cool things and gathering resources. The tether really sucked though.
I then started looking into dedicated servers. I researched and read for about a day, and decided to try HostHavoc. They seemed well regarded. I signed up for an account, ordered my conan server, and it was online within minutes. I copied my game file to the server, messed with some server settings, and boom… just like that we all had our builds, inventory, and everything we’ve spent time building, but up on a server with no tether!
Life was good for about 1.5 months. Then the lag started. When loading in, we’d have to sit there for a good minute for assets to pop in. Over the course of a week, a minute turned into 2 minutes. Over the next week after that, 2 minutes turned into 5 minutes. … which then devolved into a stuttering mess that was legitimately unplayable. Finally I submitted a support ticket. They were polite and responsive. “We’ll tweak the back end, please restart your server and let us know,” they would say. So I would do that, and nothing was meaningfully better. Finally they suggested they move us to a different server. So I agreed, and within a short time we were up on the new server and it was epic. Zero lag. Back to playing smooth and immersive.
Yeah, that lasted about an hour. Then it was back to stuttering mess. When I told them, the suggestion was once again to move servers… again. Now, I know a thing or two about datacenters. I know that at the basic level you can have a server in a rack, and you have VM (virtual machines) running on it, so that everyone’s “server” is actually just a software instance running on whatever hardware. The benefit of this is that many different installs can all run on the same hardware, and it can be moved to whatever hardware seamlessly. There can be racks and racks full of this type of configuration. At the highest level, it’s actually all 1 “server” no matter how much hardware gets stuffed into all the racks. All hot-swappable. Motherboards, ram, hard drives, power supplies, etc… all blade or module based hot swap and the primary management software is like a bios on steroids, all to service VM’s. So when a guy managing servers tells me they will move my service to a different server and tells me he’s going to “tweak the backend,” I know those are industry terms used to try to convince customers to accept placebos. I also know that whoever is managing the actual hardware can see every single bit/byte that moves on those things via fancy little gui’s. So while they “tweak the back end” they already know if they are oversubscribed or not.
Long and short of it is that the Palworld update was blamed on their server load and my lag… and I was not willing to play musical servers anymore, and still somehow end up without a chair.
Now one thing to keep in mind is that there are 2 of us that primarily play together. There has never been more than 3 people playing on my server at any given time. THREE. Maximum. Despite that fact, HostHavoc could not provide a playable experience for even 2 of us. So when faced with the suggestion to move servers… again… I decided to see if I could host my own.
This is the part where I’m telling you… don’t ever rent a server, from anybody. I grabbed a 10 year old laptop. Booted it up. Uninstalled a bunch of junk I don’t use anymore. Downloaded the Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher from here: HERE I installed it, plugged my desired settings into the various fields, and launched it. First click of the launch button, it grabs steamcmd and installs it. Second click of the install button it launches steamcmd, downloads conan dedicated server anonymously, installs and launches the conan server. I stop it, copy my game file and my server settings file in, launch the server… and boom. DONE. Completely up and running.
Fact #1 - My 10 year old laptop on wifi ran conan better for us than Host Havoc.
Fact #2 - It was easier to setup a conan dedicated server than I could possibly have imagined.
Fact #3 - It takes so little resources to run a Conan Exiles Enhanced (UE5) server for 3 people that it legitimately blew my mind how a professional hosting company couldn’t make this work in their sleep without any fuss at all. I kid you not, my 10 year old laptop sits at about 10% cpu utilization with us all in there doing whatever we want. Conan takes about 10-14 GB of ram.
Fact #4 - If I had known how simple it was to setup a dedicated server myself, I would NEVER have tried to use a “hosted” solution from anyone.
Fact #5 - I absolutely love being in full control of my conan file. The thought of losing all the effort we’ve all spent in game didn’t sit well with me. Having it at arms reach to backup as often as I want and wherever I want, makes me feel nice.
Regarding HostHavoc, everything about the experience with them was good, other than the actual game functionality. They were very responsive and fast at support requests. They were polite. They were professional. When it was all said and done with, they pro-rated a refund for me without me having to ask. I was VERY upset with them, because it was literally mind blowing how they couldn’t get a conan server for 3 people working without me having to squirm for it. Once I realized how little it took to get a server going, I was quite upset that they couldn’t provide it. (rightly or wrongly) I had pre-paid for a year of service, … over $300. They refunded almost all of that based on the 2 months or so I had used. So to their credit, if they could have just fixed my problem before frustrating me and making me look for other options… I would have been a happy customer. If I were to need a game server again in the future, I’d certainly give them a try, but first I would look at hosting one myself! Bottom line, they probably over-subscribed their hardware. Maybe if I’d have given them another chance to “move me to a different server” again, I’d have had a chair once more. … but for how long? How long before they oversubscribe my “server” again? How long before they mess something else up?
In the end, I’m very grateful that they did frustrate me, because otherwise I’d have never realized how easy it is to setup my own server and how little hardware was needed for it… and I’d have been stuck paying over $300 a year endlessly. I already have extra computers around. My conan experience is now under my full control, and it feels awesome.
So if you would like to get your own conan server going, a glorified potato with 16 gigs of ram or more, can run it. Don’t be afraid. Just give it a try. If you’re currently paying for hosting and you would rather not… give it a try. I could probably run 10 or so people on my laptop, maybe more. A little bit of money thrown into a 32GB computer with a powerful modern cpu and you’d be able to run as many as the game supports no doubt.
