How to Host an Aska Dedicated Server

I've had an Aska server running for my old co-op crew since the week the dedicated server build dropped in November 2024. Here's what I'd tell someone thinking about hosting their own – the honest version, not the brochure version.

Aska's a strange little game to host because it's hard-capped at 4 players per session. There's no "grow your community" angle here; it's just you and three friends raiding, building, and shouting at villagers who refuse to stay on the farm. But that cap is also why a dedicated server is genuinely nice to have: the world auto-pauses when nobody's logged in (that's the keep server world alive = false default), so you're not burning electricity simulating an empty Viking hamlet all week.

Should you even bother with a dedicated server?

Honestly, I'd say yes – but not for the usual reasons.

Running Aska through the normal host-and-join works perfectly well for a single evening, but the moment one person wants to log in on a Tuesday afternoon while the host is at work, you're stuck. A dedicated server just sits there. Any of the four of you can pop in, chop wood for twenty minutes, and log off, and the world keeps ticking over (or pausing, if you're the only one on). Progress is centralised, backups aren't tied to your mate's laptop dying, and invasions or raid events don't interrupt a single player's frame rate because the simulation isn't running on their machine anymore.

The other thing that often catches people out: Aska's server config is genuinely flexible. Once you're on a dedicated box you can actually tune difficulty, entity density, and villager behaviour without the host having to restart the whole session to change a setting.

Hardware: don't believe the "16 GB minimum" advice

Aska is not a hungry game. I've seen hosting guides online throwing around 12-16 GB RAM figures and it's nonsense for a 4-player-capped survival game. For a 4-player Aska server a few GB is plenty – most self-hosts get away with 4-6 GB comfortably, with 8 GB giving headroom as your settlement grows and villagers multiply. No need for 16 GB unless you're doing something unusual.

CPU-wise, any modern 2-core/2-thread allocation above 3 GHz will run it fine. The NPC villager AI is the thing that scales with world size, not raw player count, so the bigger your settlement gets, the more CPU you'll chew through. Storage is trivial – 10 GB SSD is enough, NVMe is nicer for world load times but not required.

Networking: the game/query ports need to be reachable from the internet. On LOW.MS that's all handled for you. On a home setup, it's router admin time – more on that below.

Self-hosting: the honest pitch

If you genuinely enjoy port-forwarding and restarting your home machine every time Windows decides to update at 3am, self-hosting is great. Otherwise, it's a slog. Here's what you're actually signing up for:

• SteamCMD install, then downloading the Aska Dedicated Server (Steam App ID 3246670)
• Generating a Game Server Login Token against the game's App ID 1898300
• Editing server properties.txt for display name, password, region, mode, save id
• Opening the game/query ports on your router and firewall
• Keeping your PC on 24/7, or accepting that people can't play when it's off
• Running game updates yourself every time Sand Sailor Studio ships a patch (they ship a lot – it's still Early Access)

One thing worth flagging up front: Aska's dedicated server only ships a Windows build – there's no Linux depot on SteamDB, so Linux self-hosters are out of luck unless they want to fight Wine for an afternoon. On LOW.MS we run everything server-side so it doesn't affect you, but it's the kind of thing that catches people out if they were planning to stick the server on their old home Ubuntu box.

Also, honestly, the most common support ticket we get for Aska is "my GSLT expired after I changed my Steam password" – worth knowing going in. The token is tied to your Steam account, and Steam will invalidate it silently under certain conditions. Keep a note of where you stored the token and the memo you used.

Managed hosting: my take

My take: for a 4-player game that auto-pauses when nobody's online, paying for hosting is genuinely worth it compared to leaving your home PC on all month. Electricity alone puts you within shouting distance of a hosting bill, and you don't have to care about router config, Steam updates, or GSLT rotations.

What you get from us specifically:

• Provisioning in a few minutes – order, wait for the email, connect
• Automatic cloud backups, so a corrupted save isn't a Friday-night crisis
• DDoS protection (unlikely you'll ever need it for a 4-player Aska server, but nice to have)
• A 24/7 support team that has actually seen Aska-specific problems before
• Multiple regions, so you can put the server near wherever most of your group lives
• The LOW.MS Control Panel at https://control.low.ms, which handles start/stop/restart, config edits, log viewing, and backup management

Current Aska plans and prices are on the Aska server hosting page. Two upgrades people sometimes ask about:

• RAM upgrades. Stock plans start low and you can scale to 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30 GB. For Aska, overkill – but useful if you're also running other games on the same account.
• CPU tier. If you specifically want the newest CPU silicon, there's a Latest option at checkout that guarantees a 7950X or 9950X. For Aska's workload it's not necessary, but if you like your frame-time graphs flat it's there.

The config bits you actually care about

Whichever route you go, a handful of settings are worth getting right on day one. In server properties.txt:

• A sensible display name so you can find the server in the browser
• A password unless you want randoms walking into your Viking hamlet
• A region that matches your group's geography – Aska's netcode is fine but it's not magic
• mode = custom if you plan to tweak difficulty or entity settings
• The GSLT you generated from Steam, pasted in cleanly (no trailing whitespace – it bites people)

For the full settings tour I'd point you at the Aska server settings guide, and if you want opinions on which difficulty knobs actually matter for a 4-player co-op run, there's this piece on co-op settings which I argue with myself about roughly once a month.

Things I'd do differently if I started over

A few lived lessons from hosting this thing for a year and change:

1. Back up before any invasion night. Raid events can genuinely wreck a settlement if you were undefended, and "we rolled back one night" is a much better story than "we abandoned that save."
2. Don't go mad summoning villagers early. The NPC villager management guide has more on this, but villagers scale your simulation cost faster than anything else.
3. Restart the server process weekly. Not strictly required, but Aska's still Early Access and memory footprints can drift.
4. Keep the GSLT memo somewhere you'll remember. Future-you will thank present-you.

If you hit anything weird, the Aska troubleshooting guide covers most of what we see in tickets, and if it doesn't, support are around at all hours and will actually read your logs rather than telling you to reinstall Windows.

That's genuinely it. Aska's a small, charming game and the hosting story matches – low-footprint, 4 players, auto-pausing, mildly annoying GSLT requirement. Whichever side of the self-host-vs-managed line you land on, the main thing is you stop making the same one mate stay online just so the rest of you can play. Go build something ridiculous out of timber.