Enshrouded Server Hosting: Requirements and Options for 4–16 Players

Enshrouded’s dedicated server is deceptively light on paper and heavier in practice. The official minimums — 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM — run a small server fine, but the game’s persistent voxel world keeps every player-built structure in memory and streams terrain constantly, so requirements climb as your base grows and your friend list does too. Whether you rent a dedicated hosting server, spin up a VPS, or run the free server app on an old desktop, here are the real requirements and where each hosting option starts to struggle.

What Enshrouded’s server actually needs

The dedicated server app (free on Steam under the game’s tools) runs a headless instance of the game world. Its load profile: one to two threads do most of the world simulation, memory scales with the number of loaded chunks and placed structures, and disk I/O matters for world streaming and periodic saves. Measured behavior from community-hosted servers:

Players	CPU	RAM (server)	Storage	Notes
2–4	4 cores @ 3.0 GHz+	4–6 GB	Any SSD, 30 GB free	Runs on a decent desktop
8	4 cores @ 3.2 GHz+	6–8 GB	SATA SSD	Keep save on SSD
16 (max slots)	4–6 cores @ 3.2 GHz+, high IPC	8–12 GB	NVMe recommended	Large bases raise both CPU and RAM

The official 16-slot cap is a hard limit — the server accepts at most 16 players regardless of hardware. What hardware changes is how smoothly the world streams: with several players building simultaneously, the server syncs voxel edits and structure data to everyone nearby, and a weak CPU shows up as hitches around large build sites.

Configuring the server file

All settings live in enshrouded_server.json in the server folder. The two settings that matter most are slotCount (max 16) and saveInterval, which controls how often the world is written to disk — lowering it from the default protects against rollback but increases write load, so pair an aggressive save interval with an SSD:

{
  "name": "My Enshrouded Server",
  "password": "change-me",
  "slotCount": 16,
  "userGroups": [],
  "saveInterval": 120,
  "logLevel": "INFO",
  "difficulty": "Default"
}

Open UDP 15636–15639 in the firewall for game traffic (the Steam query port is included in that range), and TCP 15637 if you use remote management tools. The server writes a dedicated save per world — back up the savegame folder before any major update, since version mismatches are the most common cause of world corruption.

Hosting options compared

Home desktop: fine for 2–8 players on a LAN or with friends, but your upload speed (typically 10–50 Mbps) caps how many remote players connect smoothly, and the server stops when the PC sleeps. Free, but it is not really “hosting.”

VPS: a 4 vCPU/8 GB VPS runs an 8-player Enshrouded server acceptably, and the price ($15–30/month) is tempting. The risk is noisy-neighbor CPU throttling during build-heavy moments and IOPS limits on the virtual disk that make saves stutter. It works — until it doesn’t.

Dedicated server: for a full 16-slot public server with plugins later, a bare-metal box is the safe choice. A 4–6 core Xeon or EPYC with 16–32 GB of RAM and an NVMe drive gives you the single-thread headroom the voxel streaming needs, plus a real 1 Gbps port so remote players aren’t capped by your ISP. It costs more ($50–150/month), but it also leaves room to run other servers or services on the same machine.

If you are already comparing providers, the same CPU and RAM diligence applies here as anywhere else — check the CPU’s single-thread performance, not just core count, and make sure the disk is an SSD, because Enshrouded’s save and stream behavior punishes HDDs visibly. Our dedicated hosting comparison lists machines with the specs above so you can match a plan to a 16-slot population directly.

Bottom line

Enshrouded’s server is forgiving at small scale — 4 cores, 8 GB of RAM, and any SSD will host a handful of friends. Cross 8 players or start building large bases, and the voxel streaming workload makes a dedicated box with fast single-thread performance and NVMe storage the difference between smooth building sessions and rubber-banding around your own castle. To price a machine sized for 16 players, compare the dedicated server plans on our site — or start with InterServer’s dedicated hosting deals if you want a quick spec-to-price anchor.