Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Hardware: Mod Load and Player Slot Sizing

Conan Exiles is a different hosting problem than most survival games. Without mods it is lightweight; with a dozen server mods it becomes memory-hungry and CPU-sensitive, and player counts swing from five to forty within an evening because raids and clan wars pull everyone online at once. This guide gives you hardware numbers broken down by the two things that actually matter: mod load and concurrent players. If you are starting from scratch, our dedicated server hosting guide for survival games is a useful companion to the sizing tables below.

The numbers here assume you are running on hardware you control, where you can set the mod list and tune the config. For a broader look at the category, see dedicated server hosting options for game communities.

Two Profiles, Two Very Different Servers

The single biggest planning mistake with Conan Exiles is sizing for a vanilla server and then loading twenty mods onto it. Mods add game-logic work to the main thread, add RAM for loaded assets, and add disk I/O for reloads. Treat them as a separate dimension.

Profile	Players	RAM	CPU	Disk
Vanilla, small	10-20	8 GB	2-3 fast cores	30 GB SSD
Vanilla, busy	30-40	12-16 GB	3-4 cores @ 4 GHz+	50 GB NVMe
Modded, small	10-20	12-16 GB	3 cores @ 4 GHz+	60 GB NVMe
Modded, busy	30-40	16-24 GB	4 cores @ 4.5 GHz+	80 GB NVMe

The jump from vanilla to modded costs roughly 4–8 GB of RAM and meaningfully more single-thread CPU, because most mods run their logic inside the main simulation loop. That is also why clock speed beats core count here: a 4-core chip at 4.5 GHz will out-perform an 8-core chip at 2.6 GHz for a server that only needs a few fast threads.

Where the RAM Goes

Conan Exiles loads the map and the active mod assets into memory. Official map size and the number of large mods dominate the footprint, not the player count itself. A 10-player modded server can easily use more RAM than a 35-player vanilla one.

Component	Approx. RAM
Server base + map	3-5 GB
Per heavy mod	0.3-1.5 GB
Per active NPC cluster	varies with thrall/base density
Headroom for GC and spikes	2-4 GB

Never run the server at 95% memory. Survival sandboxes spike when many player-built bases load into memory at once, and the OS needs room for page cache and the database file. Leave 2–4 GB spare.

CPU and Tick Behaviour

Conan Exiles runs its simulation on a limited number of threads. Core count beyond about four to six does little for gameplay; a higher sustained clock does. The danger is thermal throttling — a CPU that boosts to 4.5 GHz for thirty seconds and then settles at 3.4 GHz will hold fine in a test and stutter during a 40-player raid. Verify sustained clocks, not burst benchmarks.

Prioritise sustained single-thread clock over core count.
Confirm the host does not oversubscribe the CPU with other tenants.
Leave CPU headroom for mod logic — do not size exactly to vanilla load.
Watch for throttling during long raid sessions, not just startup.

Storage and Save Integrity

The world save database is written frequently. On SATA or shared storage, save writes cause periodic hitches because the simulation waits on I/O. Put the save file and the server install on NVMe. Keep the save file on the same fast volume as the log files so crashes are diagnosable, and schedule external backups off the same physical disk so a disk failure does not take the backup with it.

Bandwidth and Player Spikes

Per-player bandwidth is modest, but Conan Exiles has two nasty patterns: large mod downloads when a new player joins, and evening spikes when a clan war pulls thirty people online at once. A 1 Gbps uplink is plenty for the steady state; the risk is a burst of simultaneous mod downloads saturating it and causing rubber-banding for everyone mid-fight. Rate-limit mod downloads and host the mod files on a CDN or a separate path where possible.

Players	Steady outbound	Mod-download burst risk
10	~2-5 Mbps	Low
30	~6-15 Mbps	Moderate
40 with war	~10-20 Mbps	High during joins

Configuration Settings Worth Changing on Day One

Beyond hardware, a handful of server config values decide whether your Conan Exiles server stays smooth. None of them can rescue undersized hardware, but all of them matter once the hardware is right.

Setting	Suggested approach	Why
Tick/simulation rate	Highest your CPU holds at peak	Prevents overrun rubber-banding
Max players	Below the hardware ceiling	Headroom for raids
NPC/thrall density	Moderate	Drives CPU per tick
Building decay	Enabled	Keeps world size in check
Backup interval	Off-peak, throttled	Avoids I/O contention

Choosing a Server

For a serious modded Conan Exiles community, the floor is a 4-core CPU at a genuinely high sustained clock, 16–24 GB of RAM, and NVMe storage — on a platform where you control the mod set and can tune the config. Shared plans tend to fail exactly when a raid fills the server. If you are weighing options, compare dedicated server configurations on sustained clock and NVMe rather than headline core counts. Size for your mod profile and your evening peak, verify sustained clocks, and put the save on NVMe — that combination is what keeps a Conan Exiles server stable through a forty-player war.