So I’ve been playing Icarus with the wife and the optimization is hot garbage. Wife is hosting and pulling 10 fps with a Nvidia 3070TI
We enjoy the game so I start doing research. Turns out once you’ve played enough the database on the host just gets too big and chokes out the CPU threads since it can’t use more than 2 cores.
Answer is to migrate your world to a sepf hosted dedicated server. Say no more.
So now I got an excuse (wife approved) to setup a computer as a server and keep it running. I have an old HP SFF i5 16GB RAM with an SSD I’ve reimagined a few times for a home server.
Flashed it with Debian and setup the Icarus server in docker. Runs like a champ.
Bonus points. I hooked up a wattage meter and it idles at 1~2 watts!
I used to run an old gaming computer as a home server and it felt like $30 a month in electricity.
Edit: System idles at 19 watts. I had the meter plugged into the wrong device…
Now I can start throwing more stuff on there once I figure out backup for the game world incase I bork it.


If you want a webui for the debian server that gives you logs, services, ssh terminal and more then I can recommend checking out Cockpit
https://cockpit-project.org/
If you decide you want to you can install KVM/Qemu on the debian host to get into full virtualization that way. The webui can be used to configure and manage the VMs too with https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines
edit: Cockpit also has a Docker manager, though I feel it isn’t full featured yet. I mostly used it to stop and start dockers from my phone.
https://github.com/chrisjbawden/cockpit-dockermanager