Enshrouded Server RAM, Performance and Player Limit
How much memory and CPU an Enshrouded server uses, why 16 players is the limit, what affects performance, and how to tell server lag from a slow PC.
16 players is the game's limit
Enshrouded's own maximum is 16. It is not a plan limit and no amount of hardware raises it: a higher number in the settings file is treated as 16 by the server.
Player Slots can be anything from 1 to 16. Setting it lower is a real choice rather than a restriction:
| Slots | Why you might |
|---|---|
| 4 โ 6 | A group of friends. The world stays coherent and bases do not sprawl |
| 8 โ 10 | A small community with room to grow |
| 16 | A public server, accepting that it will feel busy |
Reserved slots come out of this number: see Managing Players on Enshrouded.
What it uses
Enshrouded is a memory-hungry server by the standards of survival games, and it uses most of that memory before anybody joins.
| Memory, idle | About 4 GB (Keen quote about 4.4 GB; an idle GameGrid server measured just under 4 GB) |
| Per player | Up to about another 100 MB |
| Upload per player | About 2 Mbit/s |
| Install on disk | About 9 GB |
| World save | Small: kilobytes for a new world, up to about 100 MB for a big one |
So a full 16-player server is not four times the memory of a four-player one. The world is the cost; the players are the margin.
For processors, Keen recommend 6 cores (12 threads) at 3.2 GHz for 4 to 6 players, and 8 cores (16 threads) at 3.7 GHz for 16. Your server's use is not capped part way through a session: see Uncapped Resource Usage.
What affects performance
In rough order of how much difference they tend to make:
| Thing | Effect |
|---|---|
| How much has been built | Usually the biggest factor. A world with sprawling bases is heavier than an empty one, for good |
| Enemy numbers and attackers at once | More things to simulate at the same time |
| Players online | Steady and predictable: each player adds a little |
| Terraforming | Changed terrain is stored and loaded with the world |
| Weather frequency | Minor |
Turning up how hard enemies hit or how much health they have changes how the game plays, not how much work the server does; turning up how many enemies there are does both.
Things that do not help
Worth saying, because they come up:
- Lowering the slot count on a server nobody is filling anyway. The world is the cost.
- A shorter day. It changes the clock, not the load.
- Turning off durability. A gameplay choice, not a performance one.
Things that do help
- A regular restart. Memory use grows over a long uptime. Admin โ Automatic Daily Restart restarts the server every 6, 12 or 24 hours, but only when nobody is online. See Restarts and Player Warnings on Enshrouded.
- Knowing your normal. Glance at the resource graphs on a quiet day and a busy one, so you notice when something changes.
- Tidying abandoned bases. The live map's Bases layer draws abandoned bases faint, so you can see where they are: The Enshrouded World Map.
- Fewer enemies if your server feels heavy during fights specifically.
When players say "it's laggy"
Separate the two kinds first, because they have different causes:
| What they describe | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Rubber-banding, delayed hits, enemies jumping about | The server, or the network between them and it |
| Low frame rate, stutter while looking around | Their own PC. The server is not involved |
A player with a slideshow in a big base is seeing their own graphics card struggle with what somebody built. That is not something a server setting fixes.
For the first kind:
1. Check the resource graphs for the time they describe.
2. Check whether it happens for everybody or one person. One person is usually their connection: Enshrouded Connection Problems.
3. Check the Console around that time, for GameGrid's lines and the game's warnings.
4. Open a ticket with the time it happened. That is far more useful than "it was laggy earlier".
Monitoring
Your server's Overview shows live CPU, memory and network use and the number of players online. See Resource Usage Monitor.
GameGrid watches the machine underneath as well. If it stops answering, your server is rebuilt on a healthy one: see Automatic Host Failure Recovery.