How to Install Icarus and Join a Server

The dropship leaves whether you are on it or not.

That single rule is what separates Icarus from every other survival crafting game, and it is the thing to understand before you install it. You drop from an orbital station onto the surface of a failed terraforming project, you have a job to do and a window in which to do it, and if you are still forty minutes from the landing site when the window closes then that character and everything on them is gone.

It is a survival game with an ending built into every session, and most survival games do not have one at all — which is why most of them turn into a base-building screensaver after thirty hours. Icarus makes you leave. Listings collect on the Icarus hub, and this guide covers what you are buying, how the two halves of the progression work, and how a group actually plays it together.

What you are buying, which is genuinely confusing

Icarus is a paid game from RocketWerkz, the studio Dean Hall set up after the DayZ mod. It is sold on Steam and it has been through a great deal of change since it launched.

The confusing part is the content structure. The base game has been extended by paid expansions that add new regions, and there have been bundles and editions that include different combinations of them. What one person is playing and what you have bought are not necessarily the same thing, and that matters for multiplayer, because a group needs matching content to share a world.

Before you buy anything for the purpose of joining friends, ask them what they own. Then buy that. This is dull advice and it will save you an argument.

A great many people already own this from an old bundle. Our Steam guide covers account setup if you find you do not.

Hardware is a real consideration here in a way it is not for most games on this site. Icarus is a modern, heavy, visually detailed game with weather systems and dense terrain, and it will use whatever you give it. This is not a 2004 shooter you can run on a laptop from a cupboard.

The two progressions, and why the game makes more sense once you see them

New players consistently misread the structure, so here it is plainly.

On the surface, you start from nothing. Every time. You land with the equipment you brought and a talent tree that resets, you punch trees, you build a shelter, and you work up through the crafting tiers exactly as you would in any survival game. That progress is temporary. It belongs to that trip.

In orbit, progress is permanent. Completing work down on the planet earns you standing and materials that you spend at the station on equipment and blueprints, and those come with you on every subsequent drop. This is the layer that actually accumulates.

Once you see that, the game stops feeling repetitive. A prospect is not a save file you are supposed to keep forever. It is a shift, and the point of a shift is what you bring back up.

The developers have since added modes without the hard timer, and a large share of the current player base uses them — a persistent world you can return to indefinitely, which is closer to what people expected from the genre. Both models are in the game and a group should agree which one they want before starting, because they produce entirely different sessions.

What a contract actually asks for

You do not pick a map and wander. You take a job from a board, and the job defines the drop site, the length of the window and what counts as success.

The jobs vary in shape more than new players expect. Some are gathering work: locate a quantity of something and get it back to the ship. Some are survey work, which is mostly travel and mostly about whether you can cross difficult terrain safely. Some ask you to deal with the wildlife. Some ask you to build something and leave it standing.

Read the brief before you accept, and read it again before you decide where to put your camp. The single most expensive mistake in this game is building a good base three kilometres from the thing the contract wanted you to do, then discovering the distance with an hour left on the clock.

Your first drop, in order

For a group that has never played, this sequence removes most of the frustration.

1. Take a short, low-difficulty contract. Not the interesting one. The short one.
2. Land, look at the terrain, and pick a camp site near both water and trees. Do not walk to a nicer spot.
3. Get a shelter with a fire in it up before dark. Everything else can wait; the temperature cannot.
4. Split up. One person on the contract objective, the rest on the basics.
5. Start heading back well before you think you need to. The route home is always longer than the route out, because you are carrying things.

That is a dull first session and it is the one that teaches you the systems without costing you a character.

What actually kills you

Not the wildlife, most of the time. It is the environment doing arithmetic you were not paying attention to.

Cold. Temperature is a real system with a real time-to-death, and it changes with altitude, weather and the time of day. A shelter with a fire in it is not decoration.

Oxygen. Caves are where the good ore is and caves run out of air. You go in with a way of monitoring it and a way of extending it, or you go in once.

Storms. The weather escalates and it damages structures. A base built to look nice and not to survive a storm is a lesson rather than a base.

Structural integrity. Buildings here obey load-bearing rules. A large roof with nothing holding up the middle of it collapses, and it collapses onto whatever was underneath.

The clock. Back to the top of the article. Everything above is more dangerous when you have committed to being somewhere at a specific time.

Playing it with other people

This is a co-operative game for a small group rather than a large public server, and that shapes everything about how you connect.

A friend hosts a session. The most common route. One person starts the world and the others join through the game's own menus. It works, it takes no setup, and it has the limitation every listen server has: the world only exists while the host has the game open. For a survival game with a persistent base, that is not a small thing. If the host is asleep, nobody is playing.

A dedicated server. The game supports running the world on a machine that stays on, separate from any player's client. This is the right answer for a group that wants the base to exist on Wednesday afternoon when only one person is available. Connecting to one is done through the game's multiplayer menu rather than through a console command — this is not a Source-engine game and there is no connect line to type.

If you are setting one up, the useful reading is about sizing and location rather than about the game. Where to host a game server covers why the region matters more than the specification for a group that all live in one place, and game server hosting costs is a realistic look at what a small persistent world costs to keep running.

Listings collect on the game's hub, and every entry there is queried directly rather than reported by whoever runs it.

One practical note about group size. This is not a game that improves with more people in it past a certain point. Four is comfortable. Beyond that the map fills up with half-built structures and the tech tree stops meaning anything, because somebody has already unlocked everything you were working towards. If you have a larger group, running two worlds is a better answer than crowding one.

Voice communication is close to mandatory. The timer, the split objectives and the fact that people wander into caves alone all mean that a session played in text chat goes badly. Whatever your group already uses is fine — the point is that somebody can say "I am forty minutes out and the storm is starting" and be heard.

Division of labour, which is the whole point

Icarus rewards a group that specialises more than most survival games, because the crafting tree is wide and the timer is real.

Somebody should own building. Somebody should own the tech tree, because talent points are limited and duplicating them across four people wastes most of them. Somebody should be doing the actual contracted work while the rest of the group is establishing the camp, because the mission is the reason you are there and it is entirely possible to spend a whole session building a beautiful house and failing the job.

The failure mode for a new group is four people all doing the survival basics at once. You end up with four small huts, four half-finished furnaces and no progress on anything that pays.

Agree on it in the first ten minutes. It is the difference between a session that ends with everybody on the dropship and one that ends with an argument about who was supposed to be mining.

Problems

A friend cannot join your session. Content mismatch is the first thing to check. Different owned expansions, or one player on a different game version, both produce this.

The world disappeared. If the host was running it from their own client rather than on a dedicated machine, the world lives on the host's computer. Nobody else has a copy.

You lost a character and everything on it. Working as designed, if you were playing with the timer. The permanent progression is in orbit, and the whole structure is built so that this stings without setting you back to zero.

Terrible performance in dense terrain. Foliage and shadow settings first. This game spends more on those than on anything else.

The dropship left and you were nearly there. Set an alarm. Genuinely — a lot of experienced players use a real clock rather than trusting themselves to notice the in-game one.

Where to go next

If the timed-session structure is what appeals, very little else does it and that is precisely why the game exists.

If it was the survival and building rather than the timer, the neighbours are crowded. Valheim is the one with the most staying power for small groups and it runs cheap dedicated servers well. Sons of the Forest is the closest in tone and visual density. Enshrouded and Soulmask both put a heavier building system on top of the same loop, and Palworld took the genre somewhere much lighter and picked up an enormous audience doing it.

For something harsher, Rust removes the co-operative framing entirely and 7 Days to Die puts a fixed, escalating threat on a timer that is closer in spirit to Icarus than it first appears.

And if you end up running the server for your group, running a whitelist that people actually apply to is worth reading before you open it up to anybody outside the four of you.

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