The Front is one of those survival sandboxes that's much better with a group of people than it has any right to be alone. You're a resistance fighter dropped back in time, the world is loosely a hostile empire, and the actual loop is somewhere between scavenging, building a base, and watching your friends die in funny ways while crafting a vehicle that didn't need to be that complicated. It plays best when the world keeps ticking while you're not online. Which means a dedicated server.

We've been hosting The Front since not long after launch, and most of what makes setup awkward isn't the game itself, it's the bits Samar Studio's dedicated server build leaves out of the SteamCMD download. The server binaries work. The launcher binaries don't ship. A handful of DLLs that the game client carries around aren't in the server depot, and you find that out when the NPCs spawn but never move. None of it is dramatic once you know, but it'll eat an evening if you don't.

This guide covers both routes: standing the binaries up on a Windows box yourself, or putting it on LOW.MS so the file-shuffling part is already done.

Before you start

A few facts that shape everything downstream.

The server is Windows-only. There's no Linux build of the dedicated server, and there isn't one coming as far as anyone has said publicly. You can run it under Wine on Linux if you really want to, but every guide you'll find (including this one) assumes Windows.

The server and the game share a Steam App ID (2285150), so SteamCMD pulls the full game plus the dedicated-server pieces in one go. You don't need a separate GSLT token, and SteamCMD's anonymous login is fine, you don't need to own the game on the account you use to install it.

There are four UDP ports in play, all of which need to be reachable from the outside world:

7900 is the game port (the one players actually connect to).
7901 is the beacon port, used during the join handshake. You'll forget this one exists right up until somebody can't connect.
7902 is the query port. This is how Steam's server browser sees you. If you skip forwarding this one, your server runs fine but nobody finds it.
7903 is the shutdown service port the manager uses for clean stops.

If you're running multiple servers on the same box, step the whole block up by 5 (so server two is 7905/7906/7907/7908). On LOW.MS this is handled at provision time, you don't need to do anything.

The server uses a bundled MariaDB instance for world data, not a flat save file. We get questions about this constantly because most survival games use one or more .sav files you can copy off and import. The Front doesn't. A "save" is the MariaDB state plus the world files, and either piece on its own is useless. This matters for two reasons: reinstalling the server wipes the database too (so don't reinstall as a troubleshooting step if you care about your world), and any backup that doesn't include the database isn't really a backup. Our Cloud Backup handles both halves, but if you're rolling your own, plan for it.

Anti-cheat is ACE (Anti-Cheat Expert). It's a server-side check that's on by default. Leave it on. Some clients refuse to join servers with ACE disabled, and the only reason to turn it off is if you're doing structured testing with a small group who already know what they're getting.

Two more hard rules:

The game requires the ?DedicatedServer launch URL token. It's part of the launcher's default command line, but somewhere on the way out of Samar's QA pipeline there's an alternate ?OfficialServer token that's clearly meant for their own infrastructure. If a server gets stood up with that one, NPCs spawn but never move and you'll waste two hours convincing yourself it's something else. (If you read that and went "wait, that's exactly my problem", skip to the Common Issues section.)

Server and clients have to be on the same game version. Samar patches the game fairly often, and an out-of-date client will fail to join a patched server with no useful error message.

Path 1: hosting it yourself

Install SteamCMD somewhere you don't mind it living, then run:

steamcmd +force_install_dir "C:\TheFrontServer" +login anonymous +app_update 2285150 validate +quit

When it finishes you'll have a folder that looks roughly like this:

ProjectWar\ is the game itself. The server binary is at ProjectWar\Binaries\Win64\ProjectWarServer.exe. "ProjectWar" is the internal codename for The Front and shows up everywhere in the file tree, including most of the log output, so it's worth getting used to seeing.
TheFrontManager\ is supposed to contain the manager executable and a ServerConfig_.ini file. Right out of SteamCMD it usually doesn't. This is the bit that's broken.
Engine\, _CommonRedist\, and EasyAntiCheat\ are the Unreal runtime, Visual C++ redistributables, and an EAC bootstrap respectively. The EAC folder is a red herring, the real anti-cheat is ACE which is built into the game itself.

If you fire up the server straight from SteamCMD, you're likely to hit one or both of these:

The server runs but nobody can find it in the Steam browser. This is the Steam-DLL one. The server needs steamclient.dll, tier0_s.dll, tier0_s64.dll, vstdlib_s.dll, and vstdlib_s64.dll next to its executable at ProjectWar\Binaries\Win64\. Grab them from your Steam client install (they live next to steam.exe) and drop them in.
NPCs spawn but stand still swinging their arms. This is the missing-launcher-files one. The fix the community settled on is to copy the WindowsServer\ and TheFrontManager\ folders out of a client install of The Front into the server's install directory. The manager folder contains the executable and its DLLs which the server side genuinely needs at runtime. You'll need someone with a client copy of the game to extract these; SteamCMD anonymous won't pull them.

Once that's done, run TheFrontManager\TheFrontManager.exe once. It writes a fresh ServerConfig_.ini, generates a per-host config copy with your hostname baked into it, and gives you a Start button that launches the server with a sensible command line. If you want to run headless from a batch file later, the manager writes its launch string into the same folder; copy it out.

Path 2: putting it on LOW.MS

If juggling DLL copies on a Windows box isn't your idea of a good evening, order a server for The Front and pick a region close to most of your group. It gets provisioned automatically, the missing files and DLLs are already in the install image, MariaDB is wired up, and the four ports are open before you log in.

You'll be in the LOW.MS Control Panel at that point. Four sidebar items will cover most of what you do day to day:

File Manager for editing ServerConfig_.ini and grabbing log files. SFTP on port 8822 is available for the same files if you'd rather use WinSCP or FileZilla.
Commandline Manager picks the launch profile, which is what determines PvE / PvP / admin mode. We've pre-loaded the sensible defaults; switching between them is one click and a restart.
Web Console is a live tail of the server output. Useful for confirming the server actually started, and for grabbing the line that prints the world's MariaDB connection details if you want to back things up by hand.
Steam Update is how you pull a new game build when Samar ships a patch. Don't run it mid-session, it stops the server first.

Cloud Backup and Cloud Restore capture the install plus the MariaDB world state in one shot, so a backup is a real rollback point rather than half of one. If you're going to break something on purpose (server settings experiment, mod test, whatever), take a backup first.

What to actually change in the config

TheFrontManager\ServerConfig_.ini is the file. It has one giant [BaseServerConfig] section with somewhere north of a hundred keys, most of which are gameplay multipliers (XP rate, harvest rate, NPC damage rate, decay timers, that kind of thing) that default to 1.0. You can leave the whole file alone and the server will play like a fresh public world.

The keys that actually matter to most groups, in rough order of importance:

ServerName is the public name in the server browser. Make it something searchable, not least because your console-player friends won't be able to connect by IP and will need to find you by name.
ServerPassword is the join password. Leave blank for public; if you're setting one, keep it ASCII and short. Long or unicode passwords have been known to fail silently for some clients.
QueueThreshold is the player cap. On LOW.MS this matches your slot count, set when you ordered.
ServerAdminAccounts takes a semicolon-separated list of Steam64 IDs. People with their ID in here get admin commands. Restart the server after editing.
ServerFightModeType is the PvP/PvE toggle. The valid values are listed in the manager's UI, and the safest move is to pick the mode through the manager's interface once and then leave it alone, rather than guessing at the numeric values.
IsCanChat is in-game chat on/off. Surprisingly opinionated for some groups.
UseACE is the anti-cheat toggle. Set to true. We've covered why above.
SaveWorldInterval is the autosave interval in seconds. The default of 300 (every five minutes) is reasonable; people sometimes drop it to 120 for high-activity servers.
WelcomeMessage is the text shown to players when they join. A line is plenty.

The rate multipliers (anything ending in Rate or Ratio) all default to 1.0 and accept floating-point values. 2.0 is double, 0.5 is half, 0 disables that thing entirely. The temptation when you first see the list is to crank every multiplier you like the look of and slash every one you don't, but a lot of these have second-order effects when combined. Change two or three things at a time, play a session, then change two or three more.

Save the file and restart the server before changes take effect. The manager doesn't hot-reload.

Full reference for every key is in our The Front server settings guide if you want the long version.

Connecting

Once the server is up, players add it manually in The Front's server browser. Open the multiplayer menu, switch to the Server List (or Custom) tab, click the option to add by IP:Port, and use the game port (7900 by default), not the query port. If you set a password they'll be prompted for it; if you didn't, they're in.

Public servers also show up via the Steam query mechanism once the query port is forwarded, but the add-by-IP flow is the reliable one while you're testing whether your server works at all.

When things go wrong

A few things we see in support tickets often enough to be worth listing.

NPCs not moving / standing in place swinging. Three usual causes, in order of how likely they are: the server is running with the wrong launch mode (?OfficialServer instead of ?DedicatedServer); the manager files are missing from the install (Path 1 issue covered above); the MariaDB world is in a weird state and needs a fresh world. On LOW.MS this is on us, open a ticket with the server's IP and we'll fix it from our side.

Server doesn't appear in the public browser. Almost always a query port issue. Confirm 7902 (or whatever you've mapped) is open inbound on UDP. Self-hosters: check the steam DLLs are in ProjectWar\Binaries\Win64\ as well.

Players can't join even with the right password. Get everyone to check their game version against the server. Steam should auto-update clients, but a player who's disabled auto-updates will be stuck and won't get a useful error. Easiest fix: have them run Steam Update on the client side.

The world seems to have lost progress after a patch. Samar's bigger patches occasionally aren't backward-compatible with existing worlds. We've never seen a customer permanently lose a world to this, but you absolutely want a manual backup before applying any major patch. Cloud Backup is one click; do it.

Server lags under full load. The Front leans hard on a single CPU thread. If you're self-hosting and the server is running on an older Xeon, it'll struggle with a full lobby; a newer Ryzen will breeze through the same workload. On LOW.MS you can switch your service onto our Latest CPU tier from the Configurable Resources picker on the pricing page; same plan, faster hardware.

Patches

When Samar ships a patch, run SteamCMD again without the validate flag:

steamcmd +force_install_dir "C:\TheFrontServer" +login anonymous +app_update 2285150 +quit

On LOW.MS, click Steam Update in the sidebar. Same effect, no SteamCMD. Patch the server before you ask players to update their clients, otherwise everyone will hit a version-mismatch on the first reconnect.

Most of the pain in running The Front is concentrated in the first boot. Once the manager has generated configs, the launch profile points at the right mode, and your group has agreed on a player cap and a PvP setting, day-to-day operation is mostly editing ServerConfig_.ini, restarting, and pulling Steam updates when patches drop. The rest of the time you'll be back in the game with everyone else, watching somebody crash their vehicle into a fence.

How to Host a Dedicated Server for The Front