How to Install Natural Selection 2 and Join a Server

Somebody is shouting "skulks in Cafeteria, phase gate down, we need res" and you have no idea what any of those words refer to. Then something with too many legs comes off the ceiling behind you — the ceiling, which you had not thought to look at — and you are dead in under a second.

That is the first game of Natural Selection 2 for essentially everyone. It is a genuinely difficult game to walk into, it does very little to soften that, and the people who stayed with it did so precisely because of the depth that makes the first hour so hostile.

Natural Selection 2 is a team shooter with a real-time strategy game sitting on top of it. Marines against aliens, one player on each side commanding from above, and a match that is decided by economy and map control as much as by aim. Listings for it collect on the game's hub.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Natural Selection 2, a paid game that goes on sale extremely often
• A processor that clocks well — this game asks more of the CPU than of the graphics card
• A microphone, and this is not optional in the way it is elsewhere

The microphone point is not a nicety. This game is built on the assumption that you tell your team where things are. A team that communicates beats a mechanically better team that does not, consistently and by a wide margin, and text chat is far too slow for the timescales involved.

Never used Steam? Our Steam guide is the shorter road in.

What is actually happening

Both teams start with one base and a small amount of income, and both are trying to take more of the map.

Income comes from resource nodes scattered around the level. You put a structure on a node, it produces, and that production pays for everything — the marines' weapons and upgrades, the aliens' new life forms, both sides' buildings. Nodes are the actual objective. Kills matter because they let you take and hold nodes, not the other way around.

The two sides are not mirrored. They do not have equivalent units with different models. They work differently at nearly every level, and learning one teaches you surprisingly little about the other.

The marines

Marines start with a rifle, a pistol and an axe, and the rifle stays with them all game unless the commander pays for something better.

Their strength is technology bought centrally. An armoury lets people resupply. An arms lab upgrades everybody's weapons and armour in stages, and the difference between an unupgraded marine and a fully upgraded one is enormous. Shotguns, grenade launchers and flamethrowers arrive when the team can afford them. Late in a good game, jetpacks or heavy exosuits turn up and change what is possible entirely.

The other marine advantage is the phase gate. Two of them link, and marines walk between them instantly. A team with a well-placed gate network can defend three rooms with one squad, and destroying a phase gate is often more valuable than killing the people standing next to it.

Marines are strong in open space, with a clear line of sight, in a group, with somebody welding their armour back up. Alone in a corridor, they are food.

The aliens

Aliens have no technology tree. They have bodies.

You start as a Skulk — small, fast, silent, able to run along walls and ceilings, and armed with a bite that kills an unaware marine almost instantly. Skulks die to a rifle in a moment of open ground. Everything a good skulk does is about not being in open ground.

Gorge is the builder and support life form. It cannot fight properly. It heals, it puts down small defensive structures, and it produces the sticky ordnance that removes marine buildings. A team with no gorge loses slowly and does not understand why.

Lerk flies. It fights from angles marines cannot reach and it brings the tools that make a room bad for them to stand in.

Fade teleports short distances at high speed. In competent hands it is the most frightening thing in the game — it arrives, kills, and is gone before the shooting starts, and countering one is a team problem rather than an individual one.

Onos is enormous. It absorbs an unreasonable amount of gunfire, it goes through doors, and when one arrives in a marine position the position stops existing.

Aliens also grow upgrades from structures the commander builds, which change how every life form behaves rather than what it carries.

The commander, and why it is not for your first game

One player on each side sits above the map in an overhead view and plays a strategy game. They see everything their team sees, they spend the team's income, they place buildings, and they call out orders.

This is a real job with real consequences. A bad commander loses a game that the players on the ground were winning, by spending badly, by expanding into an indefensible node, or by not noticing that half the map has quietly changed hands.

Do not take the chair for your first several games. Nobody will thank you and you will not enjoy it. Play on the ground until the room names mean something to you, then try commanding on a quiet server where somebody will talk you through it.

The corollary is that when a good commander is talking, you should do what they say. They can see things you cannot, literally.

The map is a place, and the rooms have names

This is the skill that separates players who improve from players who bounce off.

Every level is a connected set of named rooms — Summit, Veil, Tram, Docking, Refinery, Biodome, Descent, Eclipse and Mineshaft are the ones you will meet most — and the game shows you the name of the room you are standing in. Communication happens entirely in those names. "Two skulks in Sub Access" is a complete and actionable sentence to somebody who knows the map and noise to somebody who does not.

Learning one map properly is worth more than a passing familiarity with all of them. Pick whichever one comes up most on the server you settle on, and learn the room names before you learn anything else. It is unglamorous homework and it is the fastest possible improvement available to a new player.

Getting in

Install from Steam, launch once, and let the first run complete.

Use the rookie system

This is the single best thing about Natural Selection 2's community and it should be the first thing you do.

The game marks new players as rookies, visibly, and there are servers that only accept them. Play there. The whole point is that everybody else on the server is equally lost, the commanders are patient because they are also learning, and nobody is annoyed that you did not know what a phase gate was.

Leaving the rookie servers too early is the standard mistake. Stay until the words in voice chat make sense.

Finding a server

The in-game browser is under the multiplayer menu and does the job. With a population this size the list is short enough to read properly, which is an advantage over the games with four thousand listings.

The hub is where listings collect here, and the reasoning in how to find servers worth playing on applies with one adjustment specific to this game: pick one server and return to it. NS2 rewards being recognised more than almost anything else on this site, because a team that knows your name will put you somewhere useful and explain things.

Populations concentrate hard and run on local evenings. A list that looks empty at midday is a different list at nine at night in that server's own timezone, and judging from a single afternoon snapshot is how people conclude a game is dead when it has a busy Saturday.

Connecting directly

Where you have an address, take the whole thing including the port. A host running several games on one machine has moved most of them off the default, and an address without its port fails in a way indistinguishable from the server being offline.

The game has a console for entering an address directly. The server that hands you an address will tell you the exact form it expects — take it from them rather than from a guide.

Server mods download automatically when you join. The first connection to a heavily modded server is slow and every one after it is fast.

Server size changes the game completely

Worth knowing before you pick one, because this is not a matter of taste.

Natural Selection 2 at six players a side is a tactical game where every individual matters and the commander can actually direct people. At twelve a side it is a much louder, messier game where positions are overwhelmed by numbers and the strategy layer has less influence over what happens.

Both have their followers and neither is wrong, but they are genuinely different experiences and the server's slot count is what determines which one you get. Our guide to how many slots a server should have covers the general reasoning, and this game is the clearest example of it anywhere.

Performance is the other reason to care. NS2 asks a lot of the machine hosting it, particularly with a full server and a lot of structures on the map. A server running badly produces the sense that your shots are not registering, which is a server problem rather than a you problem — tick rate explained covers what is actually going on underneath that feeling.

Populated servers run Shine, the administration framework the community settled on, which handles voting, moderation and a great deal else.

Problems you will actually hit

You die instantly, repeatedly, to things you never saw. As a marine, you are being taken from above and behind. Look up. Move with somebody. As an alien, you are standing in open ground where a rifle can reach you.

Everyone is annoyed and you do not know why. Almost always a node was lost or a phase gate went down while nobody was watching. Ask. This community is more tolerant of questions than its reputation suggests, particularly on rookie servers.

The game runs badly on a machine that handles newer games fine. This engine leans on single-thread processor performance in a way modern ones do not.

You commanded and it went badly. Everybody's first command goes badly. It is a separate game and it takes separate practice.

Where this came from, and what else to try

Natural Selection began as a Half-Life mod, and that original still has a hub here. It is where the marines-versus-aliens-with-a-commander idea was invented, it is playable on top of Half-Life, and the people who made it went on to build this.

For asymmetric team play in the same tradition, Team Fortress 2 is the obvious neighbour — class-based, community-server-driven, and enormously more populated. Counter-Strike: Source is where most of the Source engine's server culture lives.

If it is the co-operative dread rather than the strategy layer that appealed, Alien Swarm and Barotrauma both put a small team in a hostile place and make coordination the actual mechanic. Barotrauma in particular shares the thing NS2 does best: a game where somebody has to do the unglamorous job, and the team that has that person wins.

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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. Natural Selection 2 servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.