How to Install Empyrion: Galactic Survival and Join a Server

The moment Empyrion earns its keep is the first time you fly something you built yourself out of the atmosphere. Not a ship you unlocked. A ship you placed block by block, with a cockpit you put where you wanted it, thrusters you had to work out the arrangement of, and a fuel tank you nearly forgot. It wobbles. It gets there.

Then you look down at the planet you spent thirty hours on and realise it is one of several dozen in the system, and the system is one of many.

Listings for it collect on the game's hub, which is where communities running persistent worlds for it appear.

What sort of game this is

Empyrion sits between three genres and takes something from each, which makes it hard to describe and easy to love once it clicks.

It is a survival game: you land on a planet with almost nothing, and oxygen, temperature, food, water and radiation all want you dead in their own way. It is a voxel building game: everything is made of blocks you place, and everything you place can be shot off again. And it is a space game with actual scale, where planets, moons and orbital space are separate places you travel between under your own power.

The four things you build are the vocabulary of the whole game:

• Bases are static. Power, storage, workbenches, defences.
• Small vessels are fighters and shuttles. Fast, fragile, atmosphere-capable.
• Hover vessels are ground craft that skim above the terrain. Mining rigs and armoured trucks.
• Capital vessels are the large ships. They carry the smaller ones, they warp between systems, and building one properly is a project measured in evenings.

Everything in that list is designed by you, or spawned from a blueprint somebody else designed. There is no shop of finished ships.

Buying and installing

It is a paid Steam game. Buy it, install from the Library, launch it once to let the first-run setup complete. If Steam is new, the Steam beginner's guide covers the account and security side.

The install lands under steamapps/common in your Steam library folder, in a directory named for the game. You will end up in there eventually, because that is where blueprints and scenario files live and where anything you download from other players goes.

Play a single-player start first, genuinely

More than most games on this site, Empyrion punishes arriving on a server without the basics. It is not that other players are hostile — many servers are entirely co-operative. It is that the game has a large vocabulary and almost none of it is guessable.

An offline start teaches you the drill, the constructor, the difference between the handheld tools, why your first shelter needs a specific block for oxygen to stay inside it, and what happens when you build a ship with the thrusters pointing the wrong way. Two or three hours will do it.

Nobody minds a new player. Everybody minds explaining the constructor for the fourth time this week.

Scenarios, and why two servers of the same game are different games

This is the single most important thing to understand before choosing a server, and it has no equivalent in most games.

Empyrion supports scenarios: complete replacement rule sets that change the tech tree, the factions, the points of interest, the balance, the loot, and how far you can get before the game expects you to leave the planet. A scenario is not a mod in the light sense. It is a different game sharing an engine.

The default experience is the one that ships with the game. Beyond it, a handful of large community scenarios dominate the server scene, and Reforged Eden is the one you will see referenced most. It rebuilds progression, makes space combat matter, and is markedly harder than the base game. People who bounce off vanilla Empyrion sometimes find it is the one they wanted.

A server advertises its scenario. Read it. Turning up to a heavily overhauled server with base-game knowledge is disorienting, and turning up to a vanilla server expecting the overhaul's content is worse.

Settings the server owner controls

Beyond the scenario, a long list of options changes the feel of a world:

CPU and mass/volume limits. Optional systems that constrain what you can build — a ship needs enough processing capacity for the devices on it, and everything has weight. Switched on, ship design becomes an engineering puzzle with real trade-offs. Switched off, you build whatever you like. Builders have strong opinions in both directions.

Blueprint spawning. Whether you can spawn a design straight from a blueprint, whether it costs the full material bill, and which classes of ship are allowed. Servers restrict this because the alternative is a new player arriving in a warship somebody else designed.

PvP and PvE playfields. Empyrion marks these per location rather than per server, so one world contains safe space and dangerous space, and the map tells you which is which before you warp.

Point of interest regeneration. The raidable enemy structures scattered around the world refill on a timer. How fast decides whether the server has a functioning economy of things to go and take.

Structure decay and offline protection. What happens to your base while you are not logged in. On any PvP-enabled world, ask before you build anything you would miss.

Blueprints, and the culture around them

Everything you build can be saved as a blueprint and shared. That single feature produced a design community that has been going for years, and it changes what multiplayer is like.

A blueprint is a complete specification of a structure — every block, every device, every arrangement. Somebody who has spent forty hours perfecting a mining vessel can hand that design to anyone. On a server that permits it, spawning one costs the full material bill and a factory to build it in, so the design is free and the ship is not.

What this means for a new player is that you are never obliged to be good at ship design in order to have good ships. It also means that the first thing an experienced player will ask you is what you are flying, and the answer tells them whose design you borrowed.

The counter-argument, and the reason many servers restrict it, is that unrestricted blueprint spawning skips the part of the game where you learn anything. A server that limits which classes you can spawn, or requires you to build the first of everything yourself, is making a deliberate choice about what its players should experience.

Building your own is worth doing at least once. A ship you designed handles the way you expected it to handle, which is not a small thing when you are trying to land it in a canyon.

Finding and joining a server

The multiplayer option on the main menu holds the server browser, with the usual filters and the usual habit of listing more dead servers than live ones.

The server list here is queried from outside the game, so a listing tells you whether a server is up and how many people are actually on it rather than what its name claims. For a game where the interesting servers are the ones with a scenario and a community rather than the ones at the top of an alphabetical list, that difference is worth something. The general argument is in finding a server worth staying on.

When you have an address, use the whole address including the port after the colon. A host running several worlds on one machine cannot put them all on the default port, and the number on its own finds nothing. If a server appears online in a listing and your client cannot reach it, that mismatch is the first thing to check, followed by whether it needs a password you were not given.

Some servers are whitelisted — you apply, they add you, then you connect. That sounds like friction and it is the mechanism that produces the better communities. Our writeup on running a whitelist people actually apply to is written from the owner's side, but it explains what the good ones are trying to achieve.

What a shared galaxy is like

The thing that surprises people about Empyrion multiplayer is how much space there is. A busy server can have thirty people on it and you will go a week without meeting one, because they are on other planets in other systems doing their own projects.

That has consequences.

Location matters more than on most servers. Setting up on the starter planet means neighbours, traffic and help. Setting up four warps out means solitude and a long trip back for anything you forgot.

The economy is real. Trading stations buy and sell, players trade with each other, and on a long-running server the price of the things you can mine easily has already collapsed. Ask what is scarce before mining a hundred tonnes of what is not.

Server performance is regional. The game splits the world into playfields and loads them as people enter them. A busy planet with four large bases on it runs worse than an empty moon, and a huge ship parked in a populated area is not making friends. Communities that have been running a while will have conventions about this.

Big builds are events. Somebody finishing a capital vessel is server news. This is a game where people ask to come and look.

Problems

You cannot breathe inside your own base. The room needs to be sealed and it needs the specific block that generates atmosphere. New players build a beautiful open-plan shelter and suffocate in it.

Your ship will not lift off. Thrust in the wrong direction, not enough of it, or no fuel. The game will tell you which, in a menu people do not find for hours.

You are freezing or cooking. Planets have climates and your armour has a temperature tolerance. Some worlds want a different suit before you land.

The join fails after an update. Client and server must be on the same build. Steam updates you automatically; server owners update when they choose. Waiting is the fix.

The join fails and it is not an update. Scenario mismatch, a missing password, or a whitelist you are not on. In that order.

Everything is slow on a planet with a lot built on it. The playfield is doing a great deal of work. This is a property of the game rather than of your machine, and it is why server owners care about where people build.

Where else to look

If the building is what grips you, Space Engineers is the other great voxel spacecraft game, with a physics model that takes the engineering further and a survival layer that takes it less far. Satisfactory and Factorio are what happens when you keep the construction and drop the combat entirely.

If it is the survival, 7 Days to Die shares the destructible-world engineering problem and puts a horde against it, while Starbound takes the multi-planet exploration in a friendlier direction.

Whichever you try, the lesson Empyrion teaches transfers: on a game with this much configuration, the server's settings page tells you more about your next hundred hours than any trailer will. Read it first, and if a server does not publish one, treat that as information too.

<!-- 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. Empyrion: Galactic Survival servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.