How to Install Natural Selection and Join a Server

About five minutes into your first Natural Selection round, a health pack drops out of the ceiling and lands at your feet. Nobody threw it. Someone on your team is sitting in a chair at the back of your base, looking down at the map from above, spending the team's resources on the corridor you happen to be standing in.

That is the commander. It is the reason a Half-Life mod from 2002 still has people playing it when almost everything released beside it is gone, and there are 16 servers listed here as this is written.

Natural Selection is marines against aliens, but the marines are playing a first-person shooter inside somebody else's real-time strategy game. One player takes the command chair and stops shooting entirely. Everyone else follows orders. Or does not, and loses.

The shape of a round

Both teams start at opposite ends of a map built out of corridors and vents, with resource nodes scattered through it.

Marines have a command chair, a pool of team resources, and no weapons worth speaking of. Aliens have a hive, personal resources that each player spends on themselves, and one starting lifeform that can bite and climb walls.

The marine commander builds. Infantry portals so dead marines can respawn, an armoury so they can reload, resource towers on every node the team can hold, an arms lab to make the rifles hurt more. Later, phase gates — teleport pads that let the team cross the map instantly, which is the single largest swing in marine strength there is.

Aliens spread. Each new hive they build unlocks a tier of abilities for every alien player, and the fastest way to lose as marines is to let all three go up while you were arguing about who should command.

Marines win by killing every hive. Aliens win by killing the command chair and everything that could rebuild it. Rounds run somewhere between eight minutes and forty, and the long ones are the good ones.

Five things you can turn into

The alien side is the reason people stay. You do not pick a class at spawn — you save personal resources during the round and evolve into something bigger, and dying as that bigger thing costs you the resources you spent.

Skulk is what you start as. Fast and small. It bites, and it walks on ceilings. A good skulk lives on the ceiling of a corridor and drops onto the back of the marine at the rear of the group. A bad skulk runs down the middle of the corridor at four marines and dies.

Gorge is the builder, and it is the least glamorous and most decisive role in the game. It spits healing and it drops resource towers. More importantly, it plants the chambers that hand your entire team their upgrades, and it builds the hives you need to win. A team with nobody willing to gorge loses slowly and never understands why.

Lerk flies. It is fragile, awkward to control, and the only lifeform that can put a cloud of umbra over an attacking Onos to soak incoming bullets. Support, not a killer.

Fade blinks — a short teleporting dash that lets it appear inside a marine group, swipe twice, and be gone before the third bullet lands. This is the lifeform everyone wants to be and the one that punishes greed hardest.

Onos is enormous. It charges, it stomps marines flat, and on a good server it will pick a marine up and eat him. Whole rounds turn on whether the alien team could afford one before the marines got heavy armour.

Marines have no equivalent variety, and that is deliberate. They get better guns, better armour, jetpacks and heavy armour, all bought by the commander, all of which they lose on death. The asymmetry is the point.

Combat mode, if the full game sounds like a lot

Later versions of the mod added a stripped-down mode with no commander and no building. No resource nodes either. Both teams level up by killing, spend those levels on upgrades, and try to destroy the single structure at the enemy's spawn.

Maps for it are named differently from the standard ones, which makes them easy to spot in a server browser. It is a much smaller game and it plays like a class-based deathmatch with an objective bolted on, but it teaches you what every alien lifeform feels like in about twenty minutes without a full team relying on you.

If you have never played, join a combat server first. Then go and be a bad skulk somewhere.

The map is doing most of the thinking

Natural Selection maps are not arenas. They are floor plans, and the round is fought over specific rooms whose names every regular knows by heart.

The structure is consistent. Marines start in one fixed location with their command chair already built. Aliens start in one of several possible hive rooms, chosen at random, with the other hive locations sitting empty and waiting to be taken. Resource nodes are spread between them, some in defensible rooms and some in corridors nobody sensible wants to stand in.

That layout produces the whole strategic game. The marine commander has to decide, in the first ninety seconds, which empty hive location to deny and which resource nodes are worth the walk. Get it wrong and the aliens have a second hive up before the marines have a working armoury. Aliens have the mirror problem: expand too fast and you have three undefended towers, expand too slowly and the marines lock the map down.

Maps like ns_hera and ns_tanith have been played continuously for over twenty years, which means the people on the server know every vent, every ceiling a skulk can wait on, and exactly how long it takes a marine group to walk from one room to another. You will not. That gap closes faster than you would expect, because there are only a handful of maps in regular rotation and they are all built to be learnable.

Watch the minimap. It is unusually informative in this game — the commander's view and yours share the same information — and a marine who checks it before turning a corner dies considerably less than one who does not.

Getting it running

Natural Selection is a mod for the original Half-Life — the GoldSrc game from 1998, which still has its own deathmatch servers. Not Half-Life: Source. Not Half-Life 2. You need the old one, and it is a paid game on Steam.

If Steam itself is new to you, our guide to installing Steam covers account setup and, more usefully, securing the account before it holds anything.

How you get the mod files has changed more than once over the years, and I am not going to give you a download instruction that may have gone stale. What is stable is the shape of it:

• A GoldSrc mod is a folder that sits inside your Half-Life install directory, alongside valve and — if you own Counter-Strike — cstrike.
• Properly packaged mods are picked up by Steam and appear in your library as their own entry.
• If one does not appear, Half-Life can be pointed at a mod folder through a launch option, -game followed by the folder name.

The version matters more than it does for most games. Servers run a specific build, and a client on a different one will be refused or will behave strangely. Before hunting for files, look at the server you actually want to play on and find out what its community expects — most of the surviving servers are attached to a Discord or forum where that question has been answered a hundred times.

Turn the console on

Add -console to the game's launch options through its Properties in Steam, launch once, and check that the tilde key opens a console. Everything below depends on it.

While you are there, -novid skips the intro. GoldSrc guesses refresh rates badly on modern monitors, so if the game feels sluggish on a high-refresh screen, that is worth chasing down in the video options before you blame the server.

Connecting to a server

The in-game browser exists, it is the same GoldSrc list Counter-Strike uses, and it is slow and cluttered. It also only shows you servers that a master list happens to know about, which for a mod this old is not all of them.

Direct connection is the reliable route. Open the console and type connect, a space, and the full address:

connect 192.0.2.10:27015

Two things about that address. The port is part of it — one machine hosting several servers cannot give them all the default, so copy what the listing gives you rather than assuming. And the first join to a server running custom maps will download those maps over the game connection, one file at a time, which is as slow as it sounds. It happens once per map, not once per join.

Our server list for the mod queries every listing directly rather than repeating what an owner claimed, so the player counts are measured. If you want the reasoning behind that, what makes a server listing trustworthy explains why claimed counts are worth so little.

Add the two or three servers you like to Favourites. Populations in a game this size are habitual — the same thirty people, the same evenings, the same timezone. A server that looks abandoned at three in the afternoon is full at nine at night, and knowing which three to check is most of the battle.

What to actually do in your first rounds

Play marine first. You have a rifle, someone is telling you where to go, and the movement is ordinary Half-Life movement.

Then read these, because nobody will tell you:

Follow the group. Marines alone die. Marines in fours kill things. The commander is drawing waypoints for a reason.

Build what the commander drops. A structure appears as a translucent shell and does nothing until a marine stands next to it and holds use. An unbuilt phase gate is a waste of the team's entire economy.

Do not take the command chair on your first night. Commanding is a separate skill, it is played with a mouse on a top-down view, and a commander who does not know the map loses the round in three minutes. Watch someone good do it.

As an alien, hearing is everything. Marines are loud. You are not, and a skulk that stops moving in a vent above a corridor is genuinely hard to spot.

Things that go wrong

The server refuses you at the last moment. Usually a version mismatch or a full server with a reserved slot. Check the build the server is running.

You appear to be in the wrong game. GoldSrc mods share an engine and a console, so a mod launched from the wrong shortcut looks like Half-Life until you notice the menu. Launch from the mod's own library entry.

Everything is downloading forever. Custom maps over the game connection. Leave it alone the first time.

Nobody will command. This is not a technical problem and there is no fix. It is the defining social fact of the game and it has been for over twenty years.

Where to go from here

Natural Selection 2 is the standalone sequel — a separate purchase, a different engine, the same idea, with its own listings. It is prettier and the commander view is better. Whether it is better as a game is an argument the community has been having since 2012, and both sides are sincere.

If what appeals is the engine rather than the marines, the other GoldSrc survivors all run on the same console and the same connect command: Counter-Strike 1.6, Condition Zero, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic. Everything you learn here about launch options, ports and slow first joins transfers directly to all of them.

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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 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 Natural Selection's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.