There's a question we get on support tickets roughly once a week: "what are the best settings for my Hell Let Loose server?" And the honest answer is always the same – it depends entirely on what you're trying to build. A competitive clan scrim box, a casual 100-slot public server, a slow-burn seeding project, and a hardcore milsim realism server all want wildly different things, and a setting that's obviously correct for one of them will actively wreck another.
So this isn't a "paste these values in and go" guide. It's a guide to figuring out which server you're actually running, and then the handful of settings that actually matter once you've decided.
Before we get into it, two things we're not going to pretend aren't true. First: if you're running anything bigger than a private scrim server, you want CRCON. It's the Community RCON tool on GitHub, it's actively maintained, and it does about 90% of the interesting tuning that the native HLL server settings can't touch on their own – level gates, role restrictions, conditional automod, broadcasts, map voting, VIP with expiration, the works. Install it first, then worry about what to change. We walk through the how-to of editing both the native settings and the CRCON side in Hell Let Loose server configuration.
Second: Hell Let Loose has three game modes – Warfare, Offensive and Skirmish. That's it. Nothing called Conquest, nothing in hidden beta. If a tutorial or a ChatGPT answer tells you to add Conquest to your rotation, close the tab. Skirmish is the short 50v50 one-sector mode, Offensive is attacker/defender, Warfare is the standard 90-minute five-point tug-of-war. Our map guide for server operators goes deeper on rotation strategy per mode – this page is more about the dials than the map list.
Right. Four profiles.
Profile 1 – The casual public server
You want the browser-scroller to click your server and stick. Most LOW.MS HLL customers are building this.
The native settings that matter:
- Max players: match your plan. Don't run a 100-slot server at 82 for "stability" – HLL is meant to be played at full strength, and half-full 100-slot servers look dead in the browser.
- Team balance: leave autobalance on. Public players don't self-balance, and a four-player delta over twenty minutes becomes a steamroller nobody enjoys.
- Vote kick: enable it, but keep the threshold high. Public servers get vote-kick brigading against anyone playing Commander badly, and you don't want your Commanders running for the hills.
- Max ping: somewhere between 150 and 200ms is the usual compromise. Too tight and you cut off legitimate regional players; too loose and you get rubber-banding tank crews.
What CRCON adds that actually moves the needle:
- Automod with progressive warn/punish/kick on the things that genuinely ruin casual matches: team killing, abandoning tanks and commander seat, playing below the squad-leader level threshold. Don't set the numbers aggressively on day one – start lenient, watch the logs for a week, then tighten.
- Role level limits – the forbid-roles plugin lets you stop a level-5 player from grabbing the Commander slot. This is probably the single biggest quality-of-life win CRCON gives public servers.
- Broadcast rotation – three or four short messages every few minutes. Discord link, rules summary, where to report someone. Not a wall of text, not flashing colours.
- Map vote at end of round – players love having a say, and CRCON's built-in map voting gives you the agency without letting rotation collapse into nothing but Carentan Warfare forever.
What we'd avoid on a casual public: strict level gates, hardcore realism tweaks, anything that makes the new-player experience worse. You're trying to fill a browser listing, not curate an audience.
Profile 2 – The seeding / growth server
This is the hardest server to run and the one we see give up most often. The trick is that the settings you want while you're at 5v5 are not the settings you want at 40v40, and the native HLL server doesn't change behaviour based on player count. CRCON does – its conditional settings can apply different rules at different player counts, which is exactly what a seeding operation needs.
Concretely:
- During seed (under about 20 per side), you want permissive everything. AFK kick basically off, no level gates, and a published set of "seed rules" – usually some version of "centre point only, no armour, no arty, no spawn camping." These are social rules, not technical ones, but CRCON can broadcast them on a timer and the automod can enforce the "no tanks during seed" part.
- At the transition point, flip to your normal public ruleset. The cleanest way we've seen this handled is with hll_seed_vip, a companion tool to CRCON that hands out short-duration VIP to players who helped seed. Rewarding seeders with a guaranteed slot during prime time is the single most effective retention tool for a growth-stage server.
- Pick one consistent seeding time and stick to it. Doesn't matter if it's 17:00 or 20:00 local, doesn't matter which continent – pick one, put it in the server name, and don't move it. Seeding is about habit as much as anything.
Seed on a small, punchy Warfare map where 8v8 still feels like something is happening. Don't seed on a huge open map – it feels empty and nobody stays.
Profile 3 – The competitive clan / scrim server
Completely different beast. You're not trying to fill a browser, you're running controlled matches for people who already know each other and are there on purpose.
- Password the server via the native settings. Done.
- Forget CRCON automod. You don't need progressive team-kill bans when the entire roster is in the same Discord.
- Do use CRCON for the match-admin side – team-switching, swapping players across sides between halves, fast map changes, live stats.
- Max ping and team balance can both be loose or off. The teams are set; let them be set.
- Keep the rotation short – two or three maps, rotated manually between matches. Forget map voting.
The useful tip here is just that CRCON's live-game view and command surface is much nicer to run a scrim from than poking at native RCON commands.
Profile 4 – The milsim / hardcore public
Somewhere between one and two. You're public, but you're curating.
- Level gate via CRCON – probably 25+ to join outside seeding, higher for Commander and Squad Leader roles specifically (the role-forbid plugin handles this cleanly).
- Strict automod on team killing and role abandonment. Milsim crowds tolerate tight rules if they're applied consistently; they lose their minds if enforcement is random.
- Mic-required rule for squad leaders. You can't technically enforce this, but you can broadcast it constantly and empower your admins to kick non-communicating SLs on sight. The culture is the setting.
- Rotation heavy on Warfare and Offensive, Skirmish as a palate cleanser. No night maps unless that's the brand.
- Restart schedule – overnight is fine, CRCON can handle it, HLL's native server does leak memory over multi-day uptimes.
The setting that's more important than all of these
Your server name. Put the region tag first, say what the server is in plain words, skip the decorative unicode borders, and don't make it so long that Steam truncates it halfway through your Discord link. Whoever scrolls past your server in the browser is making a one-second decision, and a clear name does more work than any automod setting ever will.
Beyond that – pick the profile that matches what you're actually building, install CRCON, set the handful of dials that match the profile, then leave it alone for two weeks and watch the logs before you change anything else. Most "bad server" problems we see in support tickets are from operators tweaking five things at once and losing track of what changed.