Three weeks growing a Sarcosuchus, and it ends at a waystone because someone decided a subadult crocodile was a free kill. No admin online, no rules to point at, nobody to appeal to. That's usually the moment a Path of Titans player starts reading about dedicated servers, and it's the right instinct: the game gets dramatically better the second somebody is actually curating it.
The catch is that PoT servers work differently from almost everything else in this genre, and a lot of the generic "how to host a dinosaur survival game" advice floating around is simply wrong for it. So here's what's actually involved: at home, and with us.
What a community server actually buys you
Growth rates, quest pacing, day length, who's allowed on, and what happens to the person who kills a juvenile on sight. All of it becomes yours. Run strict realism where getting a Rex to adult means something, or something relaxed for eight friends where nobody's precious about it.
The part people underrate is admin presence. Official servers have none in any practical sense, so a rule dispute has nowhere to go. On your own server you define roles, promote two or three people you trust, and the same dispute is over in thirty seconds.
Path of Titans servers don't come from Steam
This is the bit that trips everybody up. There's no SteamCMD path, no anonymous login, no server app ID to go and look up. Alderon distribute the server files themselves, through a command line tool called AlderonGamesCmd, the same job SteamCMD does everywhere else, on a completely separate platform.
You pull it from Alderon's CDN. On Windows:
https://launcher-cdn.alderongames.com/AlderonGamesCmd-Win64.exe
Linux x64, Linux arm64 and Mac builds sit at the same host if you're installing on your own box. Then you point it at the game:
AlderonGamesCmd-Win64.exe --game path-of-titans --server true --beta-branch production --install-dir ./
The second thing that catches people is authentication. Alderon's docs are blunt about it: "Both AlderonGamesCmd and PathOfTitansServer will need user authentication to the Alderon Games Platform, this can be any account that has access to the game." So no anonymous install, and no starting the server without a token either. You generate one at alderongames.com/oauth/hosting-token, and because it's a long JWT and Windows caps how long a command line can be, it normally goes into the AG_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable rather than onto the launch line.
A PoT server without a valid token doesn't limp along in a degraded state. It just doesn't start.
Running one at home
Perfectly doable, and if you like tinkering you'll be fine. You need a machine that stays on, port 7777 forwarded with the query port sitting one above it, and an Alderon account that owns the game.
Alderon don't publish server hardware requirements (mildly annoying), so here's a measured number instead of a guess. Across our own PoT fleet the server process sits between 2.5 GB and 3.5 GB resident, and the biggest sample I can find is 3.47 GB on a server with four players on it. It's mostly the map, not the population. Budget 4 GB free and an SSD and you'll be fine.
The rest of home hosting applies as usual: your upstream, your router, CGNAT if your ISP does that to you, the 3am Windows update that reboots the box mid-session, and a home connection with no DDoS protection at all. Dinosaur survival communities attract that kind of attention more than you'd expect.
What you get with us
We run Path of Titans on Windows bare metal, and the pitch is really that the paragraph above stops being your problem.
- Enterprise DDoS filtering on every server, included rather than sold as an extra
- Cloud Backup and Cloud Restore, so a broken config or a mangled database is a two-minute rollback
- Region choice at checkout, which matters more for a crossplay game than it does for most
- Instant provisioning: the install runs itself and you get a server that boots
- Web Console, File Manager, Configuration Files, Commandline Manager and Scheduled Tasks in the panel
- SFTP on port 8822 for anything too big to drag through a browser
- Actual humans on support, 24/7
Worth hearing now rather than mid-upload: you can't put .dll files onto your server through File Manager, SFTP or FTP. That's platform-wide, every game we run. It barely touches PoT (mods arrive from the in-game browser, not as loose files) but people go looking.
Ordering
Pick a plan on the Path of Titans server hosting page and choose your region. Setup asks for your Alderon auth token up front, which is deliberate: it's the one value the server genuinely cannot boot without. The rest runs itself: the install pulls the current production build straight from Alderon and the service comes up.
First-time setup
Log into the LOW.MS Control Panel and open your service. This is the short version; the Path of Titans getting started guide walks the same ground step by step and owns the auth token end to end.
Service Settings holds the PoT-specific values: Auth Token, Map, Database, Branch and Branch Password. The token stays editable, which matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to that. The Map dropdown offers Panjura, Island (that's Gondwa), CeruleanIsland and StoneclawHighlands.
Database is Local or Remote, and it's the one setting to get right on day one. Local keeps everything on the server itself under PathOfTitans/Saved/DatabaseCache/, where each account and each character is written out as its own JSON file in Account/ and Character/. Remote hands the lot to Alderon's platform instead.
Our panel defaults to Local. Alderon recommend the opposite: "It is highly recommended to use a Remote Database so that you can run multiple servers and have them share the same database." They also warn Local servers are "at risk of losing player data due to server issues or bugs", which is what Cloud Backup is there to cover.
Decide before anybody creates a character, because switching later isn't a migration. "When switching between a Local Database and a Remote Database, player data does not transfer automatically." Alderon then spell out both directions, and they don't behave the same way. Local to Remote: "The local database will be replaced, and existing local player data will be lost." Remote to Local: "The remote database remains unchanged, but the local database will start fresh."
Read that asymmetry carefully, because it decides whether a mistake is recoverable. Flip to Local, panic at the empty server, flip back to Remote, and your characters are still sitting there. Flip the other way and the local data is gone for good. Alderon's own advice covers both: "Be sure to back up any important data before making the switch."
Proper migration tooling is on their roadmap, an uploader plus a way to switch during startup, but none of it has shipped. Don't plan around it.
One server and you take backups? Local's fine, and it's where most people stay. Any chance of two servers sharing characters? Pick Remote now.
Configuration Files gives you Game.ini, GameUserSettings.ini and Commands.ini, plus MOTD.txt, Rules.txt, Bans.txt, Mutes.txt and Whitelist.txt. Game.ini carries most of the tuning: ServerDayLength, MaxGroupSize, bServerFallDamage, bServerWaystoneCooldownRemoval and so on. Our shipped default is a 240 minute day cycle, four real hours, a good deal longer than the 60 minutes Alderon's own example uses. Shorten it if you want nights to come round faster. There are far more than I'll list here, so when you're ready to tune properly, read the Path of Titans server settings guide.
Two lines in Game.ini are driven by the panel rather than by the file. The server name and the server password both come from Service Settings, so set them there. Hand-editing those two fights the panel, and the panel wins.
Admins live in Game.ini as well, under [/Script/PathOfTitans.IGameSession], one Alderon Games ID per line:
ServerAdmins=048-236-424
After that, /promote <player> <role> and /demote <player> handle everyone else from in-game. The roles themselves (Owner, Admin, Moderator and Creator, each with its own permission list and chat colour) live in Commands.ini, and you can rewrite them to suit.
Moving an existing community across rather than starting fresh? The Path of Titans save location guide covers which folders to bring and in what order.
Crossplay, and the one thing that quietly breaks it
Crossplay is the real argument for PoT over the rest of the genre. Alderon's own wording: "All platforms are able to connect and play on the same servers, so you can play with your friends no matter where they are or what their gaming device might be!" That's Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS4 and PS5, all on your one server. Your mate on a phone and your mate on a PS5 in the same pack, not something most of the competition can say.
Mods are the exception, and it's worth knowing before you install one. They go in GameUserSettings.ini under [PathOfTitans.Mods]:
EnabledMods="UGC_M_DYV7XYEGX2_SK"
One line per mod, IDs copied from the in-game Mod Browser, and the server downloads them and keeps them current by itself on boot. Nothing to upload. But some map mods aren't mobile-compatible, and a server running one of those can't be joined by mobile players at all. If a decent chunk of your community plays on a phone, check that before you commit to a custom map.
A few things we've learned running these
Generating a second auth token kills your first server. This is the one I'd tattoo on people. Alderon's docs put it plainly: "When you generate a new token any old tokens will be revoked, which can cause issues if they are still in use." So the moment you generate a fresh token for a new server, the one you already had running is authenticating with something that doesn't exist any more. One token per Alderon account, pasted into every server on it.
Server names with spaces are a trap. The name gets passed on the launch line, so a space breaks it. Every PoT server on our fleet uses underscores, and Alderon's docs confirm underscores come out as spaces in the browser. The_Waking_Hatchling, not The Waking Hatchling.
The map list isn't in one place either. Service Settings shows four maps, but Commandline Manager carries predefined lines for Riparia and for a useperfthreads variant as well. We've got servers running Riparia right now, so if the map you want isn't in the dropdown, check there before concluding we don't support it.
Memory is flat rather than player-scaled. A PoT server with nobody on it still holds around 3 GB. That's normal, it isn't a leak, and it means a dead Tuesday costs about what a packed Saturday does.
Auto-restart ships off in our default config, with a three-hour restart length already sitting there if you turn it on. I'd leave it off and use Scheduled Tasks instead: you can see those coming, move them off your peak hours, and cancel them.
BattlEye's on by default. Leave it on unless you've got a specific reason not to.
When to open a ticket
If your server starts and then vanishes from the browser, it's nearly always the auth token: mistyped, generated on an account that doesn't own the game, or quietly revoked because you made a newer one somewhere else. Re-paste it in Service Settings and restart before you go digging anywhere else. The Path of Titans troubleshooting guide covers the rest of the usual suspects.
Anything past that, open a ticket. We can read the console output and our side of the connection, which finds the problem far faster than guessing does. And if you just want somebody to glance over your config before you invite forty people onto it, that's a perfectly good reason to open one too.