How to Install Dark and Light and Join a Server

Two entirely different games have been called Dark and Light, and working out which one somebody means will save you an afternoon.

The first was a fantasy MMO released in 2006 with an enormous world and a launch so rough it became a reference point. Snail Games bought the rights to the name in 2008. The second — the one this guide is about, and the one whose listings collect here — came out of that purchase nine years later: a fantasy survival sandbox that entered Steam Early Access on 20 July 2017, built in Unreal Engine 4 by Snail Games USA. Same name, no shared code, no shared design. If a forum post about Dark and Light makes no sense to you, check which of the two it is describing before reading any further.

The 2017 game is still on the Steam store today, usually heavily discounted, and it is still labelled Early Access. It never left. Steam's own store page carries the warning it applies to abandoned projects: the last developer update was more than six years ago.

The strange bit: the official servers outlived the development

Most dead survival games follow the same path. The studio stops patching, then a year later the official servers go dark, and the private hosts are all that is left.

Dark and Light did the opposite, and it is the single oddest fact about it.

The last real bugfix landed in September 2019. There was one short text post in March 2020 and effectively nothing after. Yet in November 2023, four years into that silence, Snail was still running 122 official servers — a detail that surfaced when ARK players noticed their own official servers being switched off while this game's kept running. Average concurrency across the whole game at that point was around 74 people. That is fewer players than servers.

There had been a cull before that. An earlier announcement cut the official fleet from 344 to 100, closing completely inactive realms in one round in late January and consolidating low-population ones in a second round in February. Players on the closed realms were told to contact customer service for a copy of their world data so they could carry on locally or on a dedicated server, which is a more considerate wind-down than most games of this kind managed.

Where it stands now is thinner still. Over the last month the game has averaged around 26 concurrent players across every server it has, official and private alike, with a 24-hour peak in the low fifties. Its all-time high was 14,029, in July 2017, in the first fortnight.

None of that is a reason to refuse to install it. It is a reason to decide in advance which of the three realistic ways to play you are choosing: alone, with a group of friends on a server one of you runs, or as an experiment in what a 2017 survival game looked like. What you will not do is join a busy public world full of strangers, because there is no longer one to join.

What the survival game actually is

If you have played ARK, the loop will be immediately familiar. You arrive with nothing, hit the scenery until you have materials, climb a crafting tree, build somewhere to live and tame things to ride.

The setting is where it goes its own way. You are on Archos, a world that elven, human and dwarven refugees fled to after their home planet Gaia was destroyed, and the playable region is called The Sacred Path — one section of a map that was meant to grow and did not. Magic runs through the whole design rather than sitting on top of it. A staff is a weapon class alongside the fourteen-odd melee and ranged options, and the spell list covers movement, defence, control, weather and portals rather than just damage.

There are more than forty creature types. Some are ordinary — boar, elk — and some are the reason you bought it: unicorns, gryphons, dragons.

Taming is the part worth knowing before you start

The taming loop is unusual enough to be worth describing properly, because it is not the ARK tranquilliser routine.

You catch a creature with a harpoon and tie it down. It struggles at first and eventually tires. Once it does, you set up a feeding trough stocked with its preferred food and it domesticates over time. Getting a gryphon takes a large quantity of arrows and more patience than the video guides suggest, largely because it flies off, returns to fight you, and then flies off again.

Elemental creatures work differently again. You cannot tame those at all in the ordinary sense — you kill them, collect the fragments they drop, and take the fragments to a church to bring them back on your side. It is a genuinely odd mechanic and nothing else in the genre does it.

Flying mounts arrive earlier here than in most survival games, which changes the shape of the map quickly and is one of the few areas where this game clearly beat the one it was imitating.

Installing it

It is an ordinary Steam purchase with no separate launcher and no second account. If Steam itself is new to you, our installation guide covers making the account and securing it before you own anything worth stealing.

Budget the disk space. Steam's own listing asks for 50 GB, and the stated minimum is a 64-bit Windows install with a Core i5-2500K, 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 960; the recommended tier is an i7-5820K, 16 GB and a GTX 1070. Those numbers are from 2017 and they were ambitious then. A machine that runs modern survival games comfortably will run this one.

Read the reviews before you buy rather than after. The overall score sits at Mixed — half of just over 5,000 reviews are positive — and the overall score is dominated by launch-week opinion, which is the least useful period to read about. Recent reviews describe what happens when somebody installs it this month.

Start a single-player world first. The interface is dated and the first hour is spent learning it, and doing that alone is much pleasanter than doing it while four friends wait for you.

Connecting to a server

There is no matchmaking. You open the browser and pick a specific machine belonging to a specific person. Two things about that browser catch people out.

The filters hide more than you expect. Default filters on survival-game browsers drop password-protected servers and full ones, and very frequently empty ones as well. On a game with this population, hiding the empty servers hides nearly the whole list. Widen everything before concluding there is nothing there.

The address has two numbers, and they are different numbers. This game inherits the ARK-family networking convention: a UDP game port and a separate Steam query port. Community setup guides for it consistently forward 7777 and 7778 for the game and 27015 and 27016 for the query side. This site queries Dark and Light with the Source protocol and treats 7777 as the default, and its Steam app ID is 529180. The practical consequence is that the number in a listing is not always the number a direct connection wants, so take whatever a server owner gives you exactly as they give it to you.

The listings on this site are polled directly every fifteen minutes rather than copied from what an owner typed into a control panel. For a game in this state that distinction is worth more than usual: the honest thing a directory can do is show an empty result rather than a hopeful one, and our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy explain who benefits from the gap between measured and claimed.

Running one for your group

For this game, hosting is the realistic route to multiplayer rather than a fallback.

The server files come from SteamCMD under the same app ID as the game, 529180. The binary you launch is DNLServer.exe, and it lives in DNL\Binaries\Win64 inside the installation. Command-line parameters set the session name, maximum players, admin password and the two port numbers, in the ARK style — one long line rather than a config wizard.

Mods are the reason most groups bother. The store page lists Steam Workshop support and it works, with one quirk that trips up everyone who has run an ARK server before:

1. Subscribe to what you want in the Workshop.
2. Find the downloaded files under steamapps\common\Dark and Light\DNL\Content\Mods\. You will see a folder per mod plus a .mod file named after the Workshop ID.
3. Copy those into the same path on the server.
4. Add the IDs to GameUserSettings.ini as ActiveMods= under the [ServerSettings] header, comma-separated. Create the line if it is not there.
5. Restart.

The quirk is step four. ARK puts its mod list in Game.ini; this game wants it in GameUserSettings.ini, and putting it in the familiar place produces a server that starts cleanly and loads none of your mods.

On sizing: survival servers simulate a persistent world whether or not anybody is logged in, and the memory requirement climbs steadily with structure and creature counts over the life of a world. Undersize the box and the world degrades slowly across a month rather than failing outright, which is a much harder fault to notice. Our piece on what game server hosting costs covers that honestly.

Settle two things before anybody lays a foundation. Rates — harvesting, taming, experience, maturation — decide whether the world is a grind or an evening. The PvP rules decide whether your group is building together or against each other. Changing either later invalidates whatever people have already spent their time on, which is how private servers die at the three-week mark.

If you want a fantasy survival game with people in it

This is the section most readers need.

V Rising is the closest living relative to what this game was reaching for: magic, mounts, a castle you build and everybody else tries to break into, and a developer still shipping updates.

Conan Exiles is the harsher option — low fantasy, thralls instead of tamed beasts, brutal raiding, and a long-established unofficial server scene with communities that have been running for years.

ARK: Survival Evolved is the game this one was built in the shadow of, and it kept the crowd. ARK: Survival Ascended is the same design rebuilt on a modern engine and asks considerably more of your hardware.

Valheim takes the same ingredients somewhere gentler, and for a group of four it is the better recommendation than anything else here. Myth of Empires takes the taming-and-building structure to ancient China, with recruited soldiers and siege warfare instead of dragons.

Dark and Light is still worth an evening for the taming mechanic and the sight of a gryphon over The Sacred Path. Treat it as a private world for people you already know. It stopped being a public one some years ago, and the servers that survived the developer's attention span are not the same thing as a game with players on it.

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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. Dark and Light servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.