How to Install FOUNDRY and Join a Server

The first serious argument in any co-operative factory game happens when somebody reroutes a belt you built.

They had a reason. The reason was good. The belt now goes somewhere sensible instead of somewhere stupid, and you have spent forty minutes learning that layout and can no longer find anything. Nobody is at fault and everybody is annoyed.

FOUNDRY is a first-person factory builder where that argument happens in a world you can also dig holes in, which makes it worse and better at the same time. Listings collect on the hub, and this guide is mostly about the multiplayer side, because the single-player side is a factory game and you already know whether you like those.

What makes it different from the others

Two things, and both of them change how a shared world behaves.

The terrain is voxel and you can remove it. Not "there is a mine here" — you dig into the ground, and the ground stays dug. A factory built into a hillside is built into a hillside you carved. Vertical space is available in a way it is not in a game with a fixed heightmap, and people who like building downward have somewhere to go.

The world is generated rather than authored. Nobody has memorised the map. There is no optimal starting location that everybody already knows about from a video. Your world is yours, which matters more in co-op than it sounds, because the exploration is a shared discovery rather than a shared recital.

Put together, it means two groups playing FOUNDRY have less in common than two groups playing a game with a handcrafted map. That is a feature if you want a factory that feels like yours. It is a limitation the moment you want to look up how somebody else solved the problem in front of you, because nobody else has had your problem.

The rest is recognisable. You extract raw materials, move them with belts, process them into better materials, and use those to build things that let you extract more. Power has to come from somewhere. Research unlocks the next tier and the next tier makes the previous one look embarrassing.

It is in early access, which is worth stating plainly rather than burying. Mechanics change between versions, and anything specific written about it — this page included — should be checked against the game in front of you. We are not going to list machines, recipes or numbers here for exactly that reason.

How multiplayer works in a game like this

Factory games handle multiplayer in one of two shapes, and knowing which you are dealing with determines everything about how a group plays.

Host and join. One player's machine runs the world, everybody else connects to it, and the world only exists while that person is playing. This is fine for a group who play together anyway and terrible the moment somebody wants to log in on a Tuesday afternoon.

A dedicated server. The world runs on a machine that is not anybody's gaming PC. It exists whether or not the host is awake, and people can play in it independently.

The second shape changes the social dynamics of a factory game more than any mechanic does. When the world is always up, people play at different times, and you log in to find that somebody has finished the smelting block you left half-built. That is either wonderful or infuriating, and it is worth agreeing which before you start.

Check the current state of what FOUNDRY offers before planning around either. Early access games add and change server functionality between updates, and the game's own documentation is the authority rather than a guide written at a fixed point in time.

The social contract, which nobody writes down

This is the genuinely useful part, and it applies to any shared factory world.

Agree who owns what. The simplest arrangement that works is that each person owns their own production block and nobody rebuilds somebody else's without asking. Blocks connect at agreed boundaries. Inside the boundary, it is your problem.

Agree what is shared. Power is usually shared and usually the first thing to be over-subscribed. So is the main bus, if you build one. Both need a person who is willing to own the boring infrastructure, and that person is doing more for the group than whoever built the impressive thing.

Agree what happens to abandoned projects. Somebody will start a large build and stop playing for two weeks. Deciding in advance whether the group may finish or demolish it avoids a genuinely bad conversation later.

Do not optimise somebody else's factory while they are asleep. It is not a favour. It is the belt argument from the top of this page, and no amount of throughput improvement compensates for arriving to find your layout gone.

Groups that survive a full playthrough of one of these games are groups that had these conversations in the first hour. Groups that did not usually stop playing around the point where the factory becomes complicated enough that people cannot read each other's work.

Joining a specific server

The routine here is the same across this genre.

If a friend is hosting, they invite you or hand you an address. If a community is running something persistent, they publish an address, and it will be an IP with a port attached. Take the port. A host running several game worlds on one machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port fails in a way that looks like the server being offline.

Where the game offers an in-game list, read it for what it tells you about the world rather than the ping. A factory world's age matters enormously — arriving into a world that is four hundred hours in means arriving into somebody else's finished system with nothing left to design.

For that reason, joining a fresh or fairly young world is much better than joining an advanced one, and it is the single most useful thing to check before you connect. This is the same problem that governs choosing when to join a Rust wipe cycle, and the answer is the same: arrive at the start.

Small private groups are the normal way this genre is played. Public factory servers exist and they are a different proposition — more people, more chaos, more need for rules about who may touch what. Communities that run them well tend to whitelist, and our guide to running a whitelist people actually apply to explains why that is not gatekeeping so much as basic maintenance for a shared build.

Running one for your friends

If you want a world that persists between sessions without depending on one person being online, you need a machine that stays on.

For a handful of people, the requirements are modest. Factory games are more demanding on processor speed than on core count — a simulation stepping thousands of items along belts is doing one thing very quickly rather than many things at once — and memory demand grows with how much you have built rather than with how many people are connected.

Which means the usual sizing advice is inverted here. A four-person factory server may need more of a machine after three hundred hours than a sixteen-player shooter needs at any point. Our notes on how many slots a server needs and game server hosting costs cover the general shape, and the factory-game caveat is simply that your world grows and the shooter's does not.

Take backups. This is not a genre where losing a save is an inconvenience — it is hundreds of hours of design work, and a corrupted world with no backup ends the group's interest in the game permanently.

The first session, with a group

Three things are worth deciding before anybody places a machine.

Where the main base goes. In a game with generated terrain, the starting area is not chosen for you, and moving a factory later is a demolition project rather than a decision. Spend the first twenty minutes walking around before committing. A site with several resource types nearby and room to expand upward is worth more than one that is convenient right now.

Who is doing the exploring. Somebody has to find what the world contains, and that person is not building for the first few hours. Groups that all start building in the same spot discover the good site three hours too late.

What the naming convention is. This sounds absurd and it is the thing that saves the most arguments. Agreeing early that storage is labelled, and how, means that in eighty hours somebody can find the spare parts without asking. Factories without labels become unreadable to everybody except the person who built them, which defeats the point of playing together.

None of this is enforced by the game. All of it is the difference between a shared factory and four separate ones that happen to be adjacent.

Problems to expect

Performance falls as the factory grows. Universal to the genre. The simulation cost is in the number of moving items, not the number of players, so a large factory is heavy even when one person is online.

Somebody's client desynchronises. Reconnecting fixes most of it.

A build looks fine to you and broken to them. Occasionally a display issue rather than a real one. Have the other person reconnect before demolishing anything.

An update changes a recipe you had built around. Early access. It happens, it will happen again, and the fix is a redesign rather than a bug report.

Where else to look

Satisfactory is the closest comparison — first person, factories, co-operative — on a handcrafted world you cannot dig into. It is further along, larger, and its map is a designed object rather than a generated one. If FOUNDRY appeals in principle, that is the other half of the same conversation.

Factorio is the genre's benchmark from above rather than from inside, and its multiplayer is the most robust of any of them. People run persistent Factorio servers for years.

If the voxel side is the draw more than the belts, Vintage Story and Minecraft both have deep community server scenes built around shared worlds and mutual agreements about who builds where. Eco takes the shared-world idea furthest by making the consequences of industry a simulated problem the group has to legislate about.

And Space Engineers and Empyrion do engineering-heavy building in a persistent multiplayer world if the factory floor is less interesting to you than the machine.

FOUNDRY is the newest and the least settled of these. The trade is that you get to be early, in a world nobody has a guide for, with a group who are working it out at the same time you are. For some people that is the entire appeal.

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