Satisfactory Server Hosting Requirements, Sized Honestly
Satisfactory server hosting requirements by factory size, not player count: how much RAM and clock a megafactory needs, and what makes tick rate fall.
Satisfactory server hosting requirements are not really a player count question. The game ships with a default limit of four pioneers, and a lobby that small never strains a server. What decides your plan is the factory. Ten thousand machines running conveyor logic cost the same whether one person is watching them or four are.
That is the part people size wrong. They buy for the crew, and months later the world stutters even though the crew never grew.
The short answer to Satisfactory server hosting requirements#
Pick your tier from what the factory will look like at the end of the phase you are on, not what it looks like today. Satisfactory only grows.
| What you are running | Plan tier | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Two to four pioneers, a first factory, vanilla | Biomass (2P+) | Early phases are a few hundred machines and one or two belt networks. The memory floor matters more than the ceiling. |
| A full crew, a sprawling megafactory, mods or trains | Nuclear (4P+) | Thousands of machines, long belt and rail networks, and a save file that keeps climbing all need clock and headroom. |
Those are comfortable starting points, not ceilings to run at. A server sitting near the top of its memory allocation is one build session away from swapping, and swapping in Satisfactory looks like belts that visibly hesitate and machines that report the wrong throughput.
Machine count is the load, not headcount#
The dedicated server simulates the whole factory on every tick, whether or not anyone is logged in. Nothing sleeps because you did. The costs, in rough order:
- Active machines. Every constructor, smelter, and assembler is a small simulation the server owns. A first factory is a few hundred. A late game megafactory runs into the tens of thousands, and each one is recalculated continuously.
- Belts, splitters, and mergers. Items on a belt are tracked individually, so long trunk lines cost more than the machine count alone suggests.
- Trains and vehicles. Rail networks with pathfinding and automated trucks on paths add steady CPU cost that belts do not.
- Save growth. Saves live as single
.savfiles underFactoryGame/Saved/SaveGames/server/and grow with the factory for the life of the world. Scheduled backups need free disk to write into, so the storage figure on a plan is working space rather than spare capacity. See game server backups and schedules.
What actually drops the tick rate#
Three things, and only one of them is solved by buying more memory.
Clock speed. Satisfactory's factory simulation leans hard on a small number of threads, so a fast core beats a pile of slow ones. Our game nodes run AMD EPYC 4000 or Intel Xeon 6300 series processors with NVMe I/O over 1 GB/s for that reason, and we cap every node at 60% average CPU load so a neighbour's busy evening is not your problem. When the console starts printing tick rate warnings, that is the server telling you the simulation no longer fits in the time it has.
Autosave. The server writes the world on a timer and when a player disconnects, and that write is felt as a brief hitch that gets longer as the save file grows. Fast storage shortens it. A bloated world lengthens it. Both settings live in the in-game Server Manager, along with auto pause, which stops the factory when nobody is connected.
Update day. Coffee Stain ships builds where the server and every client have to match. A stale server is one nobody can join, so restart from the panel after a game update and let the install routine fetch the current build.
Mods raise the floor#
Mods install through the Satisfactory Mod Manager, which supports dedicated servers, and versions have to match between the server and every client. Content mods that add machines or raise limits push both memory use and the factory size your crew can actually reach, so a modded server usually wants the tier above the one its phase suggests. Decide the mod list before you pick a plan, not after. Our Satisfactory server quickstart covers the mod flow, the claim step that sets your admin password, and the Game.ini edit that raises the player limit past the default four.
What our Satisfactory plans give you#
Our Satisfactory server hosting plans are sold by resources rather than by player slots, so nobody pays extra for inviting a friend. These are live figures, read from the same data the order pages use:
| Plan | Memory | vCPU | Storage | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biomass (2P+) | 6 GB | 2 | 50 GB NVMe | $12.99 |
| Nuclear (4P+) | 10 GB | 4 | 50 GB NVMe | $24.99 |
The player figures in those plan names are guidance for how far each tier stretches, not a cap enforced in billing. vCPU is the slice of a physical core the plan reserves for you, and it stays reserved when the node gets busy.
When to size up, and when to move off a panel#
Watch the panel graphs across a few normal evenings first. Memory that sits high the morning after a restart is a sizing problem, and moving between our tiers is a prorated upgrade you can do mid-cycle without losing the save. Tick rate warnings with memory nowhere near the ceiling mean the opposite: the simulation is CPU bound, and more RAM will not touch it.
There is a third case. Once the server shares a home with a Discord bot, a mod repository, and a second game, a machine with root access makes more sense than a panel. We worked through that trade in game server hosting versus a VPS, and the same sizing logic applied to a very different game runs through Valheim server hosting requirements.
FAQ#
How much RAM does a Satisfactory dedicated server need?
More than the early phases suggest and less than panic buying implies. A first factory with a few friends fits the entry tier comfortably. A late game megafactory with trains and mods belongs on the top tier. Size for the factory you are building toward, not the one on screen today.
What is the maximum player count on a Satisfactory server?
The default is four, and you raise it with a MaxPlayers line in Game.ini. We do not sell slots, so the limit is yours to set. Your plan decides how smoothly the factory runs underneath it.
Why does my Satisfactory server lag when nobody is building?
Usually the autosave on a large world, felt as a short hitch. Sometimes it is the factory itself outgrowing the clock it has, which shows up as tick rate warnings in the console. Neither is fixed by more memory.
Does the factory keep running when I log off?
Only if you want it to. Auto pause in the Server Manager stops the simulation when the last player disconnects. Turn it off and production continues overnight, which is the point of a dedicated server for most groups.
Can I run Satisfactory on a VPS instead?
You can, and it is the right answer once you want several services on one machine. You take on the operating system, the updates, and the restart schedule yourself in exchange for root access. Our post on what a game server costs sets out the trade in money terms.