How to Install Hurtworld and Join a Server

The thing most likely to kill you in your first hour of Hurtworld is the weather.

Not a player. Not an animal. The map is divided into biomes with genuinely different climates, and the good materials sit in the ones that are trying to freeze or cook you. Ultranium comes out of the snowy Highlands, where the yetis live and where you need clothing you cannot craft yet. Mondinium comes out of Redrock, a red desert hotter than the dunes. Everything valuable is somewhere uncomfortable, and that is the whole design in one sentence: staying safe means staying poor.

The flat colours and clean geometry do not prepare you for this. It looks like a puzzle game. It is a survival shooter that Bankroll Studios described on its own store page as focused on competitive gunplay and strategic map control, and it means both words in "hardcore multiplayer survival".

Listings collect on the game's hub.

Where the game stands in 2026

Be clear-eyed about this before you spend anything.

Hurtworld entered Early Access in December 2015 and hit 13,291 concurrent players that month. It left Early Access on 10 December 2019, and that release is roughly where development stopped — most of the small team moved on around the launch, and updates dried up afterwards.

The population now averages a little under fifty concurrent players, with 24-hour peaks around 130. That is down from about sixty a year ago. Reviews sit at Mixed, 62% positive across roughly 4,700 of them.

Fifty players spread across a handful of community servers is a small game. It is not a dead one, and the difference matters. A server with fifteen regulars behaves nothing like a server with three hundred strangers: nobody raids you for practice in your first twenty minutes, chat is a conversation rather than noise, and one exchange of messages decides whether you are a person or a target. What you do not get is the thing the trailers sold. If a world full of competing strangers is specifically the point for you, the last section here points at games that still have one.

The map, and why the biomes are the map

Hurtworld's current official map is Nullius. The one before it was Diemensland, and if you find a guide, a video or a workshop item referring to Diemensland it predates the V2 overhaul of 12 January 2019 and its map knowledge no longer applies.

V2 raised the number of players a server could hold, and Nullius was built from scratch around that — new layout, new towns, expanded biome set. The structure carried over from the old map and is worth learning before you land somewhere:

• The Plains is where you spawn. Mild climate, plenty of starting resources, nothing that hunts you.
• The Forest is the first real step up.
• The Dunes is desert — hot by day, cold at night, thin on resources.
• Redrock is hotter still, and its rocks hold Mondinium.
• The Highlands is snow, yetis and Ultranium.
• The Farlands is radioactive.

Ore progresses through iron, titranium, mondinium and ultranium, which maps directly onto how far from the Plains you are willing to live.

Scattered across all of it are radtowns — pre-built locations holding loot crates. They are the best loot per minute in the game and, for exactly that reason, the reliable place to get shot.

Vehicles work differently here

In most survival games a vehicle is a late convenience. Here it is closer to a core system, and the way you get one is unusual.

You do not craft a car from a recipe. You find a wreck — a car or a quad bike, generated with a random set of panels — and you restore it by scavenging vehicle parts from the world. Two players who both have a vehicle do not necessarily have the same vehicle, and the parts economy is a reason to go somewhere dangerous.

Alongside that sits a machine tier that most players never reach on a short server life: automated drills, and enough construction to go from a hut to something worth calling a base.

Installing and first launch

It is a paid Steam purchase, installed through the Library, with no second launcher and no extra account. The Steam app ID is 393420, which you will need only if you host. If Steam is new to you, our installation guide covers making an account and securing it properly.

Launch it once and let it finish first-run setup before you go looking for anywhere to play. Check the graphics settings while you are in there — the art style is deliberately cheap to render and there is rarely a reason to leave anything low on hardware made this decade.

Then learn one key: F1 opens the console. You will need it, and it is not signposted.

Connecting

Two routes, and you should know both.

The server browser

From the main menu, choose Join Server, then the Community Servers tab. There is a search box; if you already know the server's name, type it.

Tick Show Empty Servers. On a game with this population that box is the difference between a list and a blank page, and a server sitting at 0/50 at three in the afternoon is frequently the same server sitting at 12/50 in the evening. Small survival servers have a two-hour window when everybody is on and twenty-two hours when nobody is.

The console

Press F1 and type connect followed by the address:

connect 127.0.0.1

That example is the loopback address for a server on your own machine — the developers' own instruction for testing a local install was connect localhost. For anything else, use the address you were given, and take the whole thing including the port after the colon.

The port matters more than people expect. Hurtworld servers listen on 12871 by default, and this site queries them with the Source protocol on that port. But a server also runs a separate Steam query port, 12881 by default, and that is the one responsible for it appearing in the browser at all. A host running several worlds on one machine cannot leave everything on the defaults, so copy addresses exactly rather than assuming.

The listings here are polled directly every fifteen minutes rather than repeated from whatever an owner typed into a control panel, which is the gap between a measured player count and a claimed one. Our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy go through why that gap exists and who it benefits.

Choosing a server is most of the decision

Everything about your experience is settled before you connect. Five questions, and they apply to every survival game with a browser.

Vanilla or modded? Hurtworld servers run plugins through the Oxide framework — server-side code in C#, JavaScript or Python, with hundreds of community plugins covering teleports, kits, shops, economies and admin tooling. A server with those installed is a different game from one without. Neither is wrong; joining the wrong one produces a specific kind of disappointment. The modded-versus-vanilla argument in Rust is the same argument with more people having it.

What are the gather rates? A multiplier is the single largest lever on how a server feels. Base rates make a proper base a week's project. Multiplied rates make it a Sunday.

When does it wipe? A server that never resets belongs permanently to whoever arrived first. One that resets constantly never lets anything become worth defending. Our piece on wipe schedules for solo players is written about Rust and every word of the reasoning transfers.

Is there a group cap? One player against an organised group of eight is not a game, it is a chore. Small populations soften this because the groups are smaller too. It still matters.

What happens when you log off? Some servers protect bases while the owner is away. Some do not, on the argument that the risk is the point. Find out before you build something you would mind losing.

The first hour

Do not build anything.

That sounds wrong and it is the right advice. The first hour on an unfamiliar server is for finding out what the server is — how the rates feel in practice, where the radtowns are, who is on and whether they talk. A base placed in the first twenty minutes is placed without any of that, in whatever spot you happened to be standing when you got bored.

Gather, keep moving, carry nothing you would be annoyed to lose, and pick your ground deliberately afterwards.

Say hello in chat while you are at it. On a server with fifteen people that is not a nicety. The regulars decide quickly which category you are in, and they decide based on almost nothing.

Running one for your own group

For a game at this stage, hosting is a completely reasonable answer and possibly the best one.

The server is the game executable in headless mode. A working launch line looks like this:

Hurtworld.exe -batchmode -nographics -exec "host 12871;queryport 12881;servername My New Server;addadmin <SteamID>" -logfile "gamelog.txt"

-batchmode and -nographics run it without a window and without rendering anything. -exec runs console commands at startup — the host port, the query port, the name that appears in the browser, and your own Steam ID as an admin. Both 12871 and 12881 need to be open for anyone outside your network to reach it, and if you skip the query port the server runs perfectly and appears nowhere.

Custom maps come from the Steam Workshop, and Oxide does not touch them — the plugin framework and the workshop content are independent of each other, which is convenient and also means a mismatch between what the server loads and what you subscribed to is your problem to notice.

On whether to rent: a world that only exists while one particular person's PC is on is a world nobody else can visit on a Wednesday. That is the entire argument, and our piece on what game server hosting costs covers sizing honestly.

Settle the rules before anybody builds. Rates, wipe policy, whether the group plays together or against each other, and what the admin will step in about. Those conversations, had in advance, separate a server that lasts three months from one that lasts three weeks.

Problems you will actually hit

You freeze or overheat repeatedly. Clothing first, shelter second. Exposure here is a continuous drain rather than an event, and the biome you are standing in decides which direction it drains.

Your server does not appear in the browser. Query port. It is always the query port.

Your base is gone after two days away. A raid, or a decay timer. Servers set how long unattended structures survive and rarely advertise the number.

A server you played last week has no world in it. It wiped. Nothing on your end fixes that, and it is not a bug.

If you want the same thing with more people in it

Rust is the obvious answer and the honest one — the game this genre orbits, with servers at every setting from strict vanilla to heavily modded.

Unturned keeps the low-poly presentation and is free, which makes it the easy pick for a group who will not all buy the same thing.

7 Days to Die points the crafting at a scheduled threat rather than at other players, which suits groups who want the building without the raiding. Project Zomboid is the slowest and cruellest of the set and attracts people who want the survival part taken seriously.

Any of those gives you a populated world tonight. Hurtworld gives you a quieter one with fewer people who have been there longer, and for some players that is exactly the trade worth making.

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