StarRupture dropped into Early Access on 6 January 2026 and has turned out to be one of the more interesting co-op survival games of the year — first-person survival, factory automation, and a planet that periodically tries to kill everything you've built. It's a game that's much better with friends, and hosting a dedicated server is the way to get a reliable experience out of it.
With Update 1 now live as of 9 April 2026 — a bigger map with new unlockable zones, two new resources (Powerium and Goethite), ziplines, higher-tier v.2 buildings, 40+ new recipes, three new wildlife species, and a round of dedicated-server stability fixes — now's a particularly good time to spin up a dedicated server if you haven't already.
Why bother with a dedicated server?
StarRupture supports both peer-to-peer sessions and dedicated servers. P2P is fine for a one-off evening, but there are real reasons to go dedicated once you're committed to a world:
- The world stays alive when you're not. Friends in different time zones can log in whenever and pick up where they left off. No "can everyone be online at the same time?" problem.
- Better performance. Running the game and hosting it on the same PC is a lot of load. A dedicated box handles the simulation without also trying to render your viewpoint at 144 FPS.
- No host dependency. If the P2P host drops, the session dies. A dedicated server just keeps going.
- Backups and DDoS protection if you go with a hosted solution rather than self-hosting. More on that below.
Your three hosting options
1. Self-hosting (free, but painful)
StarRupture ships dedicated server tools via Steam (in the Library → Tools section). You can run them on a spare PC at home if you really want to. The downsides are the usual ones:
- Your PC has to be powered on 24/7 for the server to stay up
- You have to port forward on your router
- Your home upload speed caps player count before the game does
- No DDoS protection, no automated backups
- You own every update and crash
Fine for testing, rough for anything you actually care about.
2. VPS / cloud (flexible, technical)
Rent a Linux VPS from somewhere like Hetzner or DigitalOcean and install the server yourself. Full control, and usually in the £8–20/mo range depending on specs — but the setup and upkeep is on you, and StarRupture's dedicated server has known rough edges in Early Access that you'll be debugging alone. Good option if you're already a sysadmin, painful if you're not.
3. Managed game server hosting (the easy one)
A managed provider like LOW.MS handles the whole stack. You pay monthly, you click Start, the server's live in a couple of minutes. You still control the configuration, but the infrastructure side is somebody else's problem.
What you get from a managed provider (any decent one, not just us):
- Provisioning in minutes rather than hours
- A web control panel for start/stop/restart/files/logs
- DDoS protection
- Automated cloud backups
- Game updates applied on restart
- Support when something breaks
This is what we'd recommend for essentially any group that's planning to put more than a couple of evenings into the server.
Pricing: what should you actually pay?
There are plenty of providers offering StarRupture. Rather than drop a big comparison table that'll be out of date in a month, the honest shortlist is: compare included RAM, CPU tier, and backup/DDoS features, not just the headline monthly number. A £5/mo server with 4 GB RAM is a worse deal than a £7/mo one with 10 GB once your first factory gets serious.
LOW.MS StarRupture hosting starts at £6.73/mo and includes 10 GB RAM as standard (upgradable to 30 GB), 2 CPU threads, 10 GB SSD, DDoS protection, automated cloud backups and full panel access. We run everything on recent AMD Ryzen hardware, with an optional Premium CPU upgrade to a guaranteed Ryzen 7950X/9950X for the most simulation-heavy bases.
Setting up a LOW.MS server
It's genuinely a few minutes of work.
- Order from the StarRupture page. Pick your slot count (the max is 4 — that's a StarRupture limit, not a LOW.MS one) and any upgrades.
- Wait for the email. Provisioning finishes fast and you get the IP, ports and panel credentials.
- Log in to control.low.ms and start the server.
- Create the first world from the StarRupture game client — this is the slightly weird bit. StarRupture wants the first save to be created via Manage Server on the game's main menu, pointing at your server IP. We've got a full step-by-step in the Getting Started guide.
- Join via Join Game → Dedicated Server and share the IP with your friends.
That's it. Optional follow-up: drop a DSSettings.txt in the server root so restarts auto-load your save — see the Settings guide.
Tips for a smooth StarRupture server
Keep the server updated. Just restart it from the panel — updates apply on start. Remind your group to update Steam clients to match, because a version mismatch is the most common "we can't join" cause.
Back up before big updates. We run automated backups, but it costs you nothing to grab a manual copy of SaveGames/<SessionName>/ via File Manager or SFTP before a major patch. It's saved me more than once — and Update 1 in particular is a patch where you want a backup in hand before you start the server on it (more on that below).
Watch RAM as your base grows. Conveyor-heavy factories eat memory. If the panel's RAM graph is sitting above 80% you're overdue for an upgrade.
Set a join password. Unless you want to host a public server, there's no reason to leave it open. Passwords are stored server-side in PlayerPassword.json — see Reset passwords to change them.
Update 1: what it means for server owners
Update 1 (9 April 2026) is the first major content drop since Early Access launch, and it affects dedicated server owners in a few specific ways worth calling out before you hit Start.
Dedicated-server stability fixes. Creepy Jar shipped a set of dedicated-server-specific fixes in this patch, including improved stability when a dedicated server loads the session, proper synchronisation of Drone Rail heat visuals on dedicated servers after a Fire Wave, extra inventory slots correctly syncing for all players on dedicated servers, and a fix for a menu hang that previously blocked access to the Server Management option while the Dedicated Server was running. If you were hitting any of those, Update 1 is the patch that resolves them.
Progression rollback — take a backup first. Update 1 rolls all Corporation Levels back to Level 1 on first load. Your existing progress isn't lost — it's returned as Data Points that you can redistribute through the Corporate Terminal to unlock Corporation Levels and rewards at your own pace — but the automatic re-levelling is irreversible once the server runs Update 1. Take a manual Cloud Backup (or SaveGames/ copy if self-hosting) before your server first starts on Update 1, so you have a clean rollback point if anything goes sideways.
Quartz is no longer a building material. Any Quartz already spent on buildings is refunded as Quartz Ores. Old Quartz Building Materials still in inventories or storage can be recycled back into Quartz Ores at the new Recycler — without loss — and then spent at the new Development Station to unlock upgraded buildings. Just worth knowing so you're not hunting for a bug that doesn't exist.
Cargo Dispatcher / Receiver rework. These are now strictly one-to-one — a Cargo Dispatcher will only talk to a single Cargo Receiver. Existing connections don't carry over and need to be manually reconnected. No more configuring parcel size either; Dispatchers now auto-pack and send every 20 seconds. If your factory's logistics backbone relied on shared receivers, plan to rework that before your next shipping run.
Teleporter is now a Corporation reward, no longer gated behind the Forgotten Engine completion. Nice quality-of-life for new worlds.
On the content side, Update 1 also adds new Points of Interest, new Abandoned Bases to search, expanded corporation levels, three new wildlife species (Vulpir, Corallion, Skylisk — mostly peaceful and shy), and a stack of new buildings on top of the v.2 tiers (Oil Extractor, Laser Drill, Refinery, Pyro Forge, Facturer, Chemical Generator, Roundabout Rail Connector, Recycler). 40+ new items and recipes to produce and ship. The new Development Station inside Habitats is where you unlock the upgraded v.2 versions of existing buildings.
Early Access: what to expect
StarRupture is still young and the devs are open about the server tools being experimental. What that means in practice:
- Regular patches, often weekly. Your server will pick them up on restart.
- Known bugs around conveyor belts (especially multi-line systems), building placement ("Location is not stable") and occasional crashes with very complex bases. Workarounds are in the Troubleshooting guide.
- Save compatibility is mostly maintained across updates but the devs make no promises. Hence the "back up before big updates" advice.
- Update 1 (9 April 2026, live now) is the first big content drop and a genuinely significant one. More updates are planned across the rest of the EA cycle.
None of that is a reason not to host a server — if anything, dedicated servers give a noticeably smoother Early Access experience than P2P, because the host PC isn't also running the game, and Update 1 specifically improved dedicated-server reliability.
Ready to give it a go? Order a StarRupture server from LOW.MS — £6.73/mo, 10 GB RAM, live in a couple of minutes.