We’ve spent last few months playing Enshrouded. The dedicated server is a resource hog tho, even on an empty server it’d use a ton of CPU time. Still lots of fun with a few friends exploring and building stuff

I’m amenable to luanti with voxelibre.

Though I don’t like the rebranding. Luanti sounds like a product you’d hear about in a drug commercial. “Side effects of luanti may include chronic flatulence, erectile dysfunction, and death”

My two most popular public game servers are Necesse and Rimworld Together. Neither have many public servers.

https://github.com/RimWorld-Together/Rimworld-Together

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1169040/Necesse/

Veloren has been a blast on my family’s self hosted system.

Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.

Vintage Story with mods. Vintage Story is a minecraft-like wilderness survivor game focusing on long term survival, not just “eat berries”. it’s under active development. https://mods.vintagestory.at/vsds the server docker image if interested.

Bit old, but pretty much everything Source Engine is self-hostable isn’t it? Most of them even come with a pre-configured SRCDS (SouRCe Dedicated Server) you can download and run right from the steam launcher.

I know I ran a GarrysMod server for quite a while; piling a shit ton of mods on it. Plus any source game you’ve got installed, Garrys Mod can and will use the resources/assets from.

Factorio

Palworld and Terraria, particularly with Tmodloader, are fun options.

UT2004

In the style of those games, self hosting a Vintage Story server is extremely easy to do. Extremely easy to customize, well documented wiki.

I’ve been running mine for over a year with zero hassle on a tiny server.

https://linuxgsm.com/servers/

I’ve been thinking about hosting a Quake II server, lately.

EDIT: Or Unreal Tournament. Both were my jam back in the day.

Space Station 14 is a blast. If you’re really interested in hosting it though you might need a larger friend group. I think you’d need maybe 10 or so people before it actually feels interesting.

Edit: There are plenty of public servers to play on too.

Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.