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 to host multiple things on that server I would suggest installing Proxmox VE. It’s Debian with everything necessary to create and manage containers and VMs. Everything is accessed from a Web interface and it’s super easy to access the terminals for the containers or use remote desktop for VMs you create.
The latest version added the ability to install docker images directly into Proxmox without needing Docker but if you prefer to use Docker then you can install Docker in a container and install your things in there.
Here’s a nice script to run afterwards to remove subscription nagging, remove enterprise repos that require subscription and add community repos.
https://community-scripts.org/scripts/post-pve-install
That site also has lots of amazing scripts to install and configure self-host projects!
A good project to try is Pelican if you want to have an easy way to create and manage game servers. It’s very simple to get the game servers up and running once Pelican is configured properly.
Oh I’m totally doing this. Thanks!!
Oh it looks like they added native support for docker just last year!
I wish you luck on your endeavors! 😁 Since I got recommend Proxmox it has completely changed my home-labbing experience for the better. It works great!
Feel free to ask if you have any questions about Proxmox and I will do my best to answer them. I am by no means an expert but I have a few peojects up and running and use NPMPlus to handle all the network routing.