The pattern's always the same. Four of you are two hours into a fresh dig, the shaft's half-braced, somebody has finally worked out where the black diamonds are, and then the host says "sorry, I've got to go" and the whole of Moria blinks out with them. Everyone else lands back on a main menu. Then on Tuesday afternoon one of your lot wants to log in for twenty minutes to smelt what they mined, and can't, because the world lives on a laptop in another time zone.
That's the honest reason to run a dedicated server for Return to Moria. It isn't about player counts: the game lets eight dwarves be connected at once and that's the ceiling, dedicated server or not. It's that the world stops belonging to one person's machine.
Do you actually need one?
Probably, if your group is more than two people who don't all play at the same time every week.
Worth knowing: the eight-player cap is on simultaneous connections, not on how many people have a stake in the world. Free Range Games are clear about that in their own server guide: there's no ceiling on how many dwarves come and go, only on how many are logged in at once. So a roster of twelve drifting in and out across a week works fine, which is exactly the shape most Moria groups settle into after the first month. That only holds if the world is always up, though, and host-and-join can't do it.
The other thing a dedicated box buys you is that your host's PC stops carrying the simulation. Moria gets heavy once you've hollowed out half a Great Hall and a horde decides to visit, and on host-and-join the person eating that cost is also trying to play the game. Move it off and their frame times stop being everyone's problem.
If it's just you and one mate who always play together on the same evenings, honestly, don't bother: host-and-join is fine and it's free. I'd rather tell you that up front than sell you something you'll cancel in a fortnight.
Self-hosting it yourself
Free Range Games ship the server as a free Steam tool, and credit where it's due, they've made it genuinely easy to get hold of. You do not need to own the game on the account you install it from.
It's Steam only. There's no Epic build of the server, no standalone download from returntomoria.com, just the one Steam depot, though your players can be on Steam, Epic, PS5 or Xbox Series X|S and all connect to the same server, because crossplay is full and has been since launch.
Through SteamCMD:
login anonymous
force_install_dir C:\moria-server
app_update 3349480 validate
exit
App ID 3349480 is The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ Dedicated Server, listed as a Tool rather than a game. It's about 3.5 GB. If you'd rather not touch SteamCMD, it also shows up in your Steam library under Tools.
Here's the part that catches people out: the server is Windows only. There is no Linux depot, and the app's Steam metadata lists Windows as the only supported OS. Free Range Games' own SteamCMD article talks about Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 or Windows 10 and 11, and nothing else. If your plan was to park this on the old Ubuntu box in the cupboard, that plan needs rethinking. You'll also want the DirectX runtimes and the Visual C++ redistributable installed, which Windows Server editions in particular tend not to have out of the box.
Beyond that it's the usual self-host tax. Forward UDP 7777 on your router, keep the machine awake, and run the update yourself every time a patch lands. Return to Moria isn't a weekly-patch game these days (1.6.7 in February 2026 is the most recent, after the Durin's Folk expansion last November), but when an update does land, a mismatched build is an instant wall of failed joins with nothing useful on the client to explain why.
What you get on one of ours
We run Return to Moria on Windows bare metal, which is the only way it can be run anyway, so there's no compatibility layer sitting in the middle pretending otherwise.
- DDoS protection on the network, which you'll probably never think about and that's rather the point
- Automatic cloud backups, so a corrupted world is an annoying hour rather than the end of the save
- Regions picked at checkout, so the server sits near wherever most of your group lives
- SFTP on port 8822 and FTP on 8821 for anything too big for the browser
- A web console, log viewer and file manager, all in the panel
- 24/7 support who've seen Moria-specific problems before
- Provisioning in a couple of minutes, not a couple of hours
The panel is TCAdmin at control.low.ms. Start, stop, restart, edit config, read logs, take a backup, all from there.
Ordering one
Pick a size on the Return to Moria server hosting page, choose your region, pay, and the email with your panel login should land while you're still reading this paragraph.
Two checkout options are worth a thought. The CPU tier pins you to our newest silicon, and a dedicated IP gets you the default ports instead of an offset allocation, handy if you'd rather hand people a clean :7777 than a :7787.
First boot, and the invite code
Start the server once from the panel and let it sit for a minute. It generates its world on that first boot, and it prints an invite code to the console when the session comes up. That code is how your friends get in: they paste it into the search prompt on the Join World screen. Direct IP and port works too.
If you miss the code in the console, it's written to Moria\Saved\Config\Status.json, which you can open straight from File Manager. Same file tells you whether the server reckons it's hosting, a quicker sanity check than reading logs.
For the full walkthrough, including what the config actually looks like, we've got setting up your Return to Moria server and a settings-by-settings tour in server configuration for Return to Moria. If you've been playing solo and want to bring that world across, Return to Moria save location and how to upload your world covers moving the .sav file over.
The settings worth getting right on day one
The ones that matter live in Service Settings and get written into MoriaServerConfig.ini for you:
- Password. Blank by default. Set one unless you're happy with strangers wandering into your Twenty-first Hall.
- World type. Campaign or sandbox. Decided when the world is created and not something you flip later, so think about it now rather than in three weeks.
- World seed.
random, or an integer if you've found a layout you like. - Difficulty preset. Story, solo, normal or hard.
- Server FPS. Leave it at 60. Dropping to 30 is a CPU-saving measure rather than a performance one, and I think it makes combat feel worse.
The world generation block only applies at creation. Once your world exists, seed and type are baked in, and difficulty moves over to the server's own console commands (setdifficulty and setcustomdifficulty) rather than the config file, which trips people up, because the setting is still sitting there in the panel looking editable.
One trap: the panel regenerates those three files from a template. MoriaServerConfig.ini, MoriaServerRules.txt and MoriaServerPermissions.txt are all managed, so a hand-edit to a line that has no matching setting in the panel can get overwritten. Change what you can through Service Settings, and open a ticket for anything the panel doesn't cover rather than fighting the file.
A few things we've learned running these
Write something in MoriaServerRules.txt. Everyone who joins sees it, up to 1024 characters. It's the cheapest way I know to stop the "which chest is communal?" argument happening for the fourth time.
MoriaServerPermissions.txt is more useful than it looks. Most people treat it as a block list and stop there. You can also set what someone's allowed to build and which storage they can touch, which is quietly excellent for a public-ish server where you don't entirely trust everybody with your ore.
Run Steam Update before your group logs on after a patch. Same build mismatch as above, and it's far and away the most common ticket we get for this game in the week after an update.
Back up before an expedition into anywhere new. Cloud Backup takes seconds. Rebuilding a settlement does not.
Don't rely on the panel for a live headcount. Return to Moria doesn't answer a standard server query, so the panel can tell you the process is up but not who's inside it: that's a limit of the game, not of us. The console's players command is the honest answer.
There's no mod support to speak of, so unlike most survival games there's nothing to install, break, and then have to uninstall at midnight. Small mercy, and after enough years of BepInEx I'll take it.
If something's misbehaving, open a ticket. Attach the log from Log Viewer and we'll actually read it, rather than telling you to reinstall. Now go and wake something in the deep.