How to Install Arma Reforger and Join a Server

Your first meaningful action in Arma Reforger will be a walk. Not a tutorial walk with a waypoint arrow — a real one, across two kilometres of Cold War farmland, towards a fight you can already hear, carrying more than you should have taken from the arsenal.

Nothing will happen for eleven minutes. Then something will, and it will be over in three seconds, and you will spend the walk back thinking about what you should have done differently.

That is the game. If it sounds tedious, this is not the shooter for you and no amount of settings will change that. If it sounds like the best part, you have found the right island. Listings for it collect on the hub, and how you pick between servers matters here more than in almost any other game, because the server decides what kind of Arma you are playing.

What it is, and what it is for

Reforger is Bohemia Interactive's Cold War military sandbox, set on Everon in 1989, with American and Soviet forces fighting over an island of villages, ridges and radio masts.

Everon is not a new place. It is the island from Operation Flashpoint, the game that started this entire lineage in 2001, rebuilt from nothing on Bohemia's Enfusion engine. Anybody who played that game twenty-odd years ago will recognise the road layout before they recognise anything else.

The engine is the reason Reforger exists. Bohemia needed to move Arma 3 forward onto new technology, and rather than disappear for years they shipped a smaller game on the new engine and let people play it while it was built. That is unusual honesty from a publisher, and it comes with the obvious consequence: things change, sometimes substantially, between updates.

It is a paid game, sold on Steam and on Xbox, and the two versions play together. Console players and PC players end up in the same servers, which had never really happened for a game this complicated.

The three things you can play

Conflict is the flagship and the reason most servers exist. Two sides fight across the whole island for a chain of bases. Capturing a base is the easy part. Holding it means getting supplies there — physically, in a truck, driven along roads that the other team also uses — because supplies are what let you build defences, spawn points and vehicles.

That supply loop is what separates Conflict from every other objective shooter. A player who spends an hour driving trucks contributes more than a player who spends an hour shooting, and good servers have people who understand this and do it happily.

Game Master is the strange one. One player takes a top-down editing view and builds the scenario live: placing enemies, spawning vehicles, changing the weather, reacting to whatever the players actually do. Everybody else plays inside whatever they create.

It is a dungeon master for a war game, and on a server with a good one it produces sessions nothing scripted could. On a server with a bad one it produces a helicopter dropped on your head as a joke.

Combat Ops is a co-operative scenario against the AI, structured enough to be approachable and open enough to go wrong. It is the sanest place to learn the controls without wasting anybody else's evening.

Before you join anything

Play the tutorials. All of them.

This is advice that most games do not need, and this one does. Reforger's control scheme has depth that no shooter has trained you for — weapon handling with several stages between "carrying" and "aiming", an inventory that models what you are physically holding, a stance system with more positions than crouch and prone, and a vehicle model where every seat does something different.

You will also want to understand the map and compass before you need them, because there is no arrow telling you where to go. Working out where you are from a road junction and a hilltop is a skill the game expects you to have.

An hour offline saves you from being the person who spawned in, walked in the wrong direction and asked in voice chat where everybody is.

Voice is not optional

Reforger's voice system is spatial. People near you hear you speak, at a volume that falls off with distance, and radios connect people who are not near you.

That means the game is played by talking. Not by pinging. Not by typing. Servers that are worth playing on have people giving contact reports out loud, and joining one with your microphone unplugged makes you a passenger.

Set it up before you connect. Check which key transmits on which channel, because direct speech and radio traffic go to different places and broadcasting your muttering to an entire battalion is a rite of passage nobody enjoys.

Choosing a server

Here is the part that generic guides skip, and it is the part that decides whether you enjoy this game.

Reforger servers are not interchangeable. The mode is set by the server. The mod list is set by the server. Whether people take it seriously is set by the server's administrators and the regulars they have kept.

The in-game browser is where you start. It filters on the things that matter — the scenario running, whether mods are required, region, and how full it is — and it has a favourites list that you should start using on the first evening. Where you have been given a specific address by a community, the browser is also where you enter it.

Some rough guidance on reading the list:

Official servers are a starting point, not a destination. They work, they are always up, and they have no culture. You will get the mechanics from them and nothing else.

Community servers with rules are where the game is good. A server with a stated ruleset, a Discord and an administrator who plays on it is running a different game from an anonymous public box, even with identical settings.

Modded servers are worth the download. More on that below.

Ping matters more here than in a twitch shooter, and less than you fear. Vehicles and ballistics are simulated in a way that makes a bad connection obvious. Our note on where to host a game server by region explains why the closest server is usually the right one, and the logic reads the same from the player's side.

Mods, and why they are painless here

Reforger uses Bohemia's own workshop rather than Steam's, integrated into the game itself.

The practical effect is that joining a modded server works. You pick the server, the client fetches what the server requires, and you play. There is no collection to subscribe to, no load order to manage and no separate launcher to configure — which anybody who has set up a modded Arma 3 install will recognise as a substantial improvement over the previous twenty years.

It also means console players get mods, which is the part that genuinely had not been done before at this scale.

The first join to a heavily modded server downloads a lot. Start it and go and make tea. It happens once, and updates afterwards are incremental.

The habits that make you useful

New Reforger players are not bad at shooting. They are bad at the other ninety per cent.

Take less. The arsenal will let you carry an enormous amount and the game will make you regret it. Weight affects how fast you move and how long you can keep moving. A light rifleman who arrives is worth more than a heavily equipped one who does not.

Drive the truck. Somebody has to move supplies, most people find it dull, and a base with supplies is a base that can fight. Volunteering for this makes you immediately valuable on any Conflict server.

Say where you are, then what you see. "Contact" tells nobody anything. A direction, a distance and a description is a report somebody can act on.

Do not run in the open because the map is quiet. The map is quiet because nobody has shot yet.

Learn one vehicle properly. Being the person who reliably gets a squad from the base to the fight is a whole role, and it is more useful than being an average shot.

Problems worth anticipating

You spawn and cannot find the war. Normal. Read the map, find the contested base, and get in something with wheels.

Everything is slower than you expected. Also normal, and it is the design rather than a fault. Reforger is not a game you play for twenty minutes between other things.

An update changed something you had learned. This happens. The game has been developed in the open on a live population, and mechanics have been reworked between versions. Anything you read about it — including this page — should be checked against the game in front of you.

A modded server will not let you in. Almost always an incomplete download or a mod that failed to update. Letting it finish, or restarting the client, resolves most of it.

You get shot from somewhere you cannot see. There is no killcam telling you where from. Sit with that for a minute and then approach that ridge differently next time.

Game Master, and why it is worth finding a good one

The mode deserves more attention than it gets, because it solves a problem that plagues military sandboxes.

An open-world war game with no authored structure produces long stretches of nothing. Game Master puts a person in charge of that. They see the whole map, they can place anything, and they can react to what the players are actually doing rather than to what a script predicted.

A good one gives you a mission, lets you complete it badly, and builds the consequence into what happens next. A patrol you failed to intercept turns up somewhere inconvenient forty minutes later. The session has a story because somebody is writing it in real time.

A bad one drops a tank on your squad because it seemed funny.

Servers running Game Master regularly tend to advertise it, and they are worth favouriting when you find one. This is the closest thing military sandboxes have to a dungeon master, and the difference between a session with a good one and a public Conflict server is enormous.

Where this sits in the family

If Reforger works for you, the rest of Bohemia's catalogue is where this goes next.

Arma 3 remains the larger game by an enormous margin — a decade of mods, whole conversions, community operations run to a schedule, and a scale of scenario that Reforger does not attempt. Its interface is older and its engine shows its age, and none of the people playing it care.

Arma 2 is where DayZ came from, which is worth knowing because that mod created an entire genre out of this engine's willingness to simulate inconvenient things. DayZ as a standalone game runs on Enfusion too, which makes it Reforger's technical sibling more than its ancestor.

Outside Bohemia, Squad is the obvious neighbour — the same commitment to logistics and communication in a tighter package with a stricter server culture — and Hell Let Loose applies a similar philosophy to the Second World War.

Reforger is the smallest and newest of these, and it is deliberately unfinished. That is the trade. What you get for it is the engine that everything Bohemia makes next will run on, and an island that has been quietly waiting since 2001.

<!-- joingg-footer -->

---

JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Arma Reforger servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.