How to Host an ICARUS Dedicated Server in 2026
ICARUS is one of the few survival games where a host disconnect doesn't pause the session. It ends your prospect timer, and if your characters happen to be on the surface when that happens, you can lose the gear they were carrying. That single quirk is the reason most co-op groups we talk to eventually start asking about a proper dedicated box. Once you've watched a friend's wifi drop mid-mission and taken half the squad's loadout with it, the appeal of a server that just sits there and runs becomes obvious.
This is a guide to actually getting one set up in 2026, written from the perspective of a host that runs a lot of these. RocketWerkz (Dean Hall's studio, of DayZ fame) has kept ICARUS on a steady update cadence, and a few of those updates have meaningfully changed what hosting looks like. The Week 54 patch, for example, removed the old 8-player cap on dedicated servers, which changes the calculus on player slots quite a bit.
Why a hosted client isn't enough
You can technically host ICARUS straight from the game client, and for a one-off evening with two friends that's fine. Beyond that it falls apart fast. The host has to be online for anyone to play, your machine is rendering the game and running the server simultaneously, and any persistent prospect (Open World or Outpost) is tied to whenever that one person feels like booting up. A dedicated server decouples the world from any single player. People drop in when they want, the world keeps ticking, and nobody's broadband becomes a single point of failure.
Self-hosting versus a managed provider
RocketWerkz ships the dedicated server software for free through Steam. It's Windows-native upstream, so if you want to run it on Linux you're looking at the community Docker route. The most active option is mornedhels/icarus-server, which handles auto-updating and is well-maintained. We've used it ourselves for staging boxes and it's solid.
Self-hosting is fine if you already have hardware sitting around, you're comfortable with port forwarding and firewall rules, and you don't mind being on the hook for backups, updates, monitoring and any DDoS nonsense that comes your way. For everyone else, the maths usually points at a managed host. You're paying somebody to make all of that go away.
What actually matters when picking a host
A few things genuinely move the needle for ICARUS specifically, and a lot of things don't.
ICARUS leans heavily on single-thread CPU performance. That's an Unreal Engine 4 trait more than anything specific to RocketWerkz, but it means the per-core speed of the server CPU has more impact on tick rate than raw core count. A host that's transparent about its hardware is worth more than one that just says "high performance."
RAM is the second thing worth paying attention to. ICARUS is hungrier than people expect, and a busy Open World prospect with a sizeable group will chew through memory in a way that, say, a Valheim world simply does not. Underspeccing here is the most common cause of the "why does our server stutter every five minutes" complaint.
Location matters for latency in the obvious way. If your group is split across Europe and North America, pick the midpoint that hurts the fewest people. And finally, look for a panel that lets you actually do things without raising tickets: console access, file editing, configuration files, scheduled restarts, backups you can trigger and restore yourself.
Hosting on LOW.MS
For the LOW.MS plans we run, ICARUS is one of the games where we offer up to 20 slots, in line with the post-Week 54 cap removal. Our ICARUS hosting page has the current pricing and slot configurations, and you can pick a region at checkout. Both Linux and Windows backends are available, so if you have a preference (or a specific Docker mod setup), that's covered.
The control panel is TCAdmin, accessed at control.low.ms. It's not the prettiest panel on the market, but it does the things that matter for ICARUS: a Web Console for live commands, a File Manager for editing ServerSettings.ini directly, a Configuration Files section with the common settings broken out, Cloud Backup, Steam Update for pulling new game versions, and Scheduled Tasks for nightly restarts. Servers also sit behind DDoS protection and run automatic cloud backups, so a botched config or a corrupted save isn't fatal. Support is on call 24/7 if any of that goes sideways.
Once you've ordered, the server is provisioned automatically. From there it's a case of editing your server name, password, and prospect type, then handing the IP and port out to your group. The defaults are UDP 17777 for the game and UDP 27015 for queries, and we leave those open by default. Our ICARUS Getting Started Guide walks through the first-boot steps in more detail, and the Server Settings Guide covers the ini options that aren't obvious.
Picking a prospect type
Prospects are the heart of how ICARUS structures play, and they come as .prospect files in three flavours. Open World prospects are persistent sandboxes with no timer, and they're what most dedicated server groups gravitate towards because progress isn't on a clock. Outposts give you a permanent base that survives between runs, which pairs well with groups that want to do timed missions but keep a home to come back to. Mission prospects are the original ICARUS format: timed, objective-driven, and unforgiving. If the timer runs out while characters are on the surface, the equipment they're carrying is gone. Worth knowing before you set one up as your main world.
DLC and maps
The base game ships with the Olympus map. From there the paid expansions add their own: Styx (the Styx Expansion), Prometheus (New Frontiers), and Elysium (Dangerous Horizons), which released in March and added the Eden NPC settlement among other things. Each one adds new biomes, recipes and progression that we won't try to enumerate here because RocketWerkz keeps tweaking the specifics.
The important hosting detail is that to join a prospect on a DLC map, players generally need to own that DLC themselves. If your group is mixed, run your main server on Olympus and treat DLC maps as an occasional thing for nights when everyone with the relevant expansion is online. It saves a lot of awkward "I can't connect" messages.
If something does go wrong, the ICARUS Troubleshooting Guide covers the usual suspects, version mismatches being far and away the most common.