How to Install Half-Life and Join a Server

Half-Life is remembered as a single-player game, which is fair — it changed what people expected from one. The multiplayer that shipped alongside it gets forgotten, and it should not, because 203 servers are still running it.

Deathmatch in Half-Life is a strange, fast, physics-abusing thing that no game since has really imitated. It is also the cheapest way into the entire GoldSrc ecosystem, since buying it gives you the engine that Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic all sit on.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Half-Life, a paid game and a very cheap one
• About 4 GB free

Check your library before buying anything: this has been folded into enough bundles that people own it without knowing. Our Steam guide covers the account side.

Check your library first. Half-Life has been bundled into so many Valve packages over twenty-five years that a great many people already own it without having noticed.

What the purchase includes

One purchase, two things. The single-player campaign that made the game's reputation, and Half-Life Deathmatch, the multiplayer mode, which is what this guide is about.

They share an installation and a launcher entry. There is no separate multiplayer product to buy.

Note that Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift are separate purchases. Opposing Force has its own deathmatch mode with a different weapon set, and it is a different game with a different server list.

Step 1: install

Install from your Library. Files land in steamapps/common/Half-Life. The folder that matters is valve inside it — that is the base game's own directory, and it is where custom maps and configuration go.

If you already own Counter-Strike, this is the same parent directory. Both are Half-Life mods that Valve absorbed, and they share an installation root.

Step 2: launch options

Right-click the game in Steam, Properties, Launch Options:

-console -novid

-console enables the developer console, which you need to connect to a server by address. -novid skips the intro.

On a high-refresh monitor add -freq and your refresh rate — -freq 144 — because the engine will otherwise sit at 60 Hz without telling you.

The game will launch into the single-player menu. Multiplayer is a separate option in that menu, not a separate program.

Step 3: rates

The network defaults on this engine were set when a fast connection was 56 kilobits. They were never updated. In the console:

rate 25000
cl_updaterate 101
cl_cmdrate 101

Servers that cannot support those values silently reduce you, so asking costs nothing and gains a lot on servers that can. This is the single most useful thing you can do to a GoldSrc game and almost nobody tells new players about it.

Step 4: the weapons, and the two that define the game

Half-Life Deathmatch runs on the single-player arsenal, and two of those weapons make it a different game from every other shooter of the era.

The tau cannon, sometimes called the gauss gun. Its secondary fire charges and releases a beam that punches through walls — and, crucially, launches you backwards. Firing it at the floor while jumping throws you across a map. This is not a bug; it is how experienced players move, and it costs health.

Snarks. Live creatures you throw. They chase whoever is nearest, including you if nobody else is close, and they are the most irritating thing in the game to be on the receiving end of.

The rest is the campaign's arsenal working as you remember. The crowbar kills, the crossbow snipes and pins bodies to walls, the gluon gun is a continuous beam that melts anyone who stands in it, and tripmines and satchel charges let you build traps that persist.

The RPG is laser-guided. You steer it after firing by keeping the laser on the target, which means a good player can take a corner with it.

Step 5: the maps

The rotation on most servers is narrow and the classics are genuinely classic.

crossfire is the one everyone knows. An open bowl of a map with a bunker at one end, a resupply area, and a button that calls an orbital strike which kills everything above ground. Learning where the shelter is, and getting to it in the seconds after somebody presses the button, is the map's whole social contract.

boot_camp is a small, tight arena built around a central courtyard with a tau cannon in it. Fast, brutal, and the map most likely to be running when a server is nearly empty.

stalkyard is a scrapyard with strong verticality and a lot of cover, which makes it the least chaotic of the popular maps.

lambda_bunker, undertow, datacore, gasworks and subtransit fill out the standard rotation. Undertow has water, and water in GoldSrc handles in a way that will surprise you the first time.

Community maps go far past these, and a server running its own map pool is common.

Step 6: find a server

There is no matchmaking. You choose a machine and connect to it.

The in-game browser is under Find Servers, Internet tab. It populates slowly and sorts on numbers servers can inflate.

Our Half-Life list queries each listing directly every fifteen minutes, so the counts are measured rather than claimed, and each entry has a copyable address.

The population concentrates: a small number of servers hold most of the players, and they fill in the evening in their own region. A list that looks empty in the afternoon is a different list at 9pm local time.

Step 7: connect

Console:

connect 192.223.30.44:27015

Take the port with the address. 27015 is the default, and any host running more than one server has moved most of them.

First connection to a modded server downloads its custom content file by file. GoldSrc has no fast download mechanism worth the name, so a heavily modified server can take several minutes the first time. It happens once per map.

Bunny hopping, and why it was never removed

You will be killed by someone travelling considerably faster than the game appears to allow, and it is worth knowing what happened rather than assuming they were cheating.

GoldSrc handles air movement in a way that lets you gain speed by turning while strafing mid-jump. Chain the jumps without touching the ground for long, and speed accumulates. Done well it roughly doubles how fast a player crosses a map.

This was an accident in the physics code, discovered by players, and Valve chose to leave it. By the time anyone considered removing it, it had become how the game was played at a high level — and every GoldSrc game inherited it, which is why Counter-Strike 1.6 has entire servers dedicated to it and why KZ exists as a mode at all.

Some servers install plugins that limit it. Most do not.

You do not need it to enjoy deathmatch. Combined with tau jumping, though, it explains most of what looks impossible in your first hour, and knowing that keeps you from concluding the server is full of cheaters when it is full of people who have been playing since 1999.

Settings that survive a restart

valve/config.cfg is rewritten by the game every time you quit, so editing it directly accomplishes nothing.

Put anything you want to keep in valve/userconfig.cfg. Create it if it does not exist. It is executed automatically, and it survives updates, crashes and verifying the game files.

Problems you will actually hit

"Steam validation rejected". A non-Steam client meeting a server that requires a legitimate copy. If you own the game, verify the files through Steam's Properties menu.

The game is stretched or letterboxed. Set resolution and aspect ratio in Options, Video. It was built for 4:3 and will not guess.

Mouse feels wrong. Set m_rawinput 1 in the console and turn off mouse acceleration in Windows. GoldSrc's mouse handling predates every convention you are used to.

Everyone is moving faster than you. They are tau jumping, and probably bunny hopping as well. Both are engine quirks from 1998 that were never removed, and both are considered part of the game rather than exploits.

Server not responding. Check the port. Then check the listing — if it shows offline there, nothing on your end will help.

What buying this actually gets you

Worth saying plainly, because it is the strongest argument for the purchase.

Half-Life is the base game for an entire generation of multiplayer. Counter-Strike, Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic and Natural Selection are all GoldSrc, all still have servers, and all use exactly the console, the rate settings and the userconfig.cfg trick described above.

Learning the engine once means being able to join any of them, and the games themselves are all inexpensive.

Where to go next

The full guide to Half-Life deathmatch servers goes deeper into the scene and what separates a server worth returning to.

If the era appeals more than this specific game, Counter-Strike 1.6 is where most of the GoldSrc population actually is, and Team Fortress Classic is the class-based ancestor of Team Fortress 2.

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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. Half-Life servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and Half-Life's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.