How to Install Enshrouded and Join a Server

Walk into the fog and a countdown starts. You have a fixed amount of time inside before it kills you, and everything worth having in Enshrouded is somewhere under it.

That single rule organises the whole game. The Shroud is not weather and it is not a damage-over-time effect you tank through — it is a timer, and every expedition into it is a calculation about how deep you can go and still get out. Extending the timer is progression. Finding a way to breathe down there is a reward.

Around that sits a voxel world you can dig into and build out of, a handful of craftspeople you rescue and put to work, and up to sixteen people who can share the same world with you. Listings gather on the Enshrouded hub.

What you are getting

Enshrouded is a survival game with an action-RPG attached, set in a ruined kingdom called Embervale, and the two halves genuinely support each other rather than sitting awkwardly together.

The world is voxels all the way down. Not a building grid dropped onto a terrain mesh — the terrain itself is the material. You can dig a staircase into a cliff, hollow out a hill, flatten a slope because you wanted a flat slope, or tunnel under a mountain because that is shorter than going over it. Most survival games let you place things. This one lets you remove things, and that turns out to change what building means.

Movement matches it. A glider and a grappling hook make traversal vertical, so the correct route between two points is regularly over the top of something rather than around it. After ten hours of this, other survival games feel like they are made of walls.

Combat is stamina-managed melee, bows and magic, closer to an action RPG than to the swing-and-hope of most survival crafting. It has a dodge and the dodge matters.

The Flame, and why your base is where it is

You do not build wherever you like. You light a flame altar, and that altar claims an area around it.

The altar is your respawn point, the anchor for your base, and the thing that decides how much you are allowed to build. Upgrading it extends what it protects and what it permits. Practically, this means base placement is a real decision rather than a matter of taste — you are choosing a region to operate out of, and moving later is work.

The craftspeople are the other half of it. You find them in the world, wake them, and they live at your base: the ones who smith, the ones who brew, the ones who build. Each unlocks a branch of what you can make. A base without them is a house. A base with them is the reason you go out at all.

On a shared server, all of this is collective. Somebody else's altar placement is now your altar placement, and the base you come home to was designed by a committee.

Buying and installing it

Enshrouded is a paid game on Steam. Buy it, install it from your Library, and expect a substantial modern download rather than the small ones elsewhere on this site.

Our Steam guide covers account creation and the security settings worth changing first.

Hardware is a genuine consideration. A voxel world that every player can dig into is expensive to keep track of, and a heavily built server with sixteen people on it asks more of both the client and the host than a fresh world does. If the game runs well at the start and badly forty hours later, that is not a bug, that is a base.

Getting onto somebody else's world

The path in is through the game rather than through a console or an external launcher.

1. Get the details from whoever runs it. An address, and a password if the server has one. Most do.
2. Open the game's multiplayer join screen. This is where an address goes. There is no developer console with a connect command in this game.
3. Copy the whole address, including its port. Any host running several game servers on one machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port is the single most common reason a join fails without explaining itself.
4. Expect the first connection to take a while. You are downloading a world, not a map.
5. Ask about your character before you commit. How progress carries between a solo world and a server is the first question worth asking the person running it, because the answer determines whether an evening on their server advances anything you already have.

Listings collect on the Enshrouded server list, where entries are queried directly rather than trusting what a server says about its own population.

Hosting for a group

The game ships with a dedicated server tool, and running one is closer to administering a small service than to clicking Host. Configuration lives in files rather than in a menu.

Playing without one is entirely reasonable for a group that is online at the same time — one person opens their world and the others join. The limits are the familiar pair: people outside your network need your router configured to let them in, and the world stops existing when you close the game.

The moment somebody wants to log in on a Tuesday while everyone else is asleep, you need a machine that stays on. Our breakdown of what game server hosting costs covers what that actually runs to, and how many slots to buy is worth reading first, because sixteen is a maximum rather than a target and a six-person world is a different game from a sixteen-person one.

What a shared world does to the game

Sixteen people in one persistent world is a different proposition from sixteen people in a lobby, and the differences are social rather than mechanical.

Everything is shared and nothing is instanced. The chest somebody emptied is empty. The tunnel somebody dug through the hill is now the route everybody uses. The hideous tower a friend built next to your carefully planned base is permanent until one of you removes it, and removing it is a conversation.

That produces two kinds of server. On a small private world with people who know each other, the shared build becomes the point — a base that nobody would have designed alone, with everyone's contribution visible in it. On an open public world, it produces a settlement, which needs somebody making decisions about where things go.

Progression is where the friction usually shows up first. Levelling is individual, and a player who joins forty hours late arrives in a world where the shroud regions everyone else is clearing will kill them instantly. Good servers plan for this — a starter area left intact, somebody willing to walk a new player through the early flame altar upgrades, spare equipment in a shared chest.

Ask how a server handles latecomers before you join one that has been running for months. It is the difference between joining a game and watching one.

Progression, briefly

Levelling hands you points to spend in a broad skill tree with enough branches that two players can end up genuinely different. Nothing forces you to commit early, and the tree is wide rather than deep, so the useful question is not which build is best but which one covers the gap in your group.

The other progression is the map itself. Towers scattered across Embervale reveal the terrain around them once you have climbed them, and climbing one is a small platforming problem rather than a walk. Getting to a new region's tower early is worth doing, because navigating an unrevealed map with a shroud timer running is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds.

Playing it well

Extend the Shroud timer before you go deeper. The timer is the gate on everything, and pushing into a region without having improved it is how you lose a run's worth of materials.

Mark the way out. The Shroud is disorienting by design, and a countdown you are watching is not a state in which you navigate well. Know your exit before you commit.

Dig. New players fight the terrain for hours before it occurs to them that the terrain is optional. Do not build a staircase up a cliff; cut one into it.

Build near what you need. Your altar decides your commute. A beautiful base an inconvenient distance from anything is a base you will abandon.

Split the crafting. On a shared world there is no reason for four people to level the same skills. One armourer, one builder, one person who actually enjoys farming.

The glider changes what a map is. Height is a resource. Getting high and gliding covers distance faster than running, and the terrain is authored with that in mind.

Problems worth expecting

You cannot join a friend's world. Check the address and port together, then check that they have opened their network to you at all. A world hosted from inside the game on a home connection is not reachable by default.

Version mismatch. The client and the server have to be on the same build. After an update, a dedicated server needs updating too, and whoever runs it may not have noticed yet.

Performance drops on an old world. A heavily terraformed, heavily built server is doing more work than a new one. This is the cost of the voxel world and the fix is on the host's side.

You lost your building permission. Almost always a flame altar's boundary rather than anything you have done wrong.

Progress did not carry across. Ask before you play, not afterwards.

Where this sits among its relatives

Enshrouded's closest neighbour by feel is Valheim, which shares the co-operative survival shape, the emphasis on building somewhere you actually want to live, and a combat system that expects you to dodge. Valheim is harsher and more atmospheric. Enshrouded is more generous, more vertical and much freer with what you can do to the ground.

V Rising takes the same base-building-plus-progression structure and points it at PvP, where your castle is something other players intend to break into. That is a different social contract entirely and worth knowing before you pick one.

Palworld sits closer to the automation and collection end, and Nightingale shares the building-in-a-strange-world premise with a very different tone.

What none of them have is the fog and the clock. The Shroud is the reason this game has a shape rather than an open field of activities, and the reason a group of four will spend an evening arguing about whether they can make it to the far side and back.

If you are still choosing where to play, our guide to finding the best game servers covers picking somewhere with people who will still be there next month, which for a persistent-world game is the only question that matters.

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