How to Install Necesse and Join a Server

There is a moment in Necesse where you stop mining. Not because you are bored of it, but because somebody else is doing it now — a settler you recruited and handed a pickaxe and a job, working a seam while you are three islands away fighting something with too many legs.

That is the hinge the whole game turns on, and it is what separates it from the top-down survival crafting games it superficially resembles. Most of them are about what you can do. This one becomes, fairly quickly, about what you can arrange for other people to do.

Necesse is a small game made by a very small team, and it has a good deal more in it than its screenshots suggest. Listings collect on the Necesse hub. This guide covers what the game is, how co-operative play changes it, and how connecting to a server actually works.

What you are getting

A top-down survival and adventure game in pixel art. You gather materials and build a base. You craft progressively better equipment and fight bosses that gate your access to the next tier of everything.

If you have played Terraria, that structure will be familiar down to the rhythm of it: a wall of early-game grinding, a boss, a sudden jump in what you can make, then a new area that was previously lethal. Necesse follows that shape closely enough that it invites the comparison and confidently enough that it survives it.

Where it diverges is the world layout and the settlement layer.

The world is not one continuous map. It is divided into discrete areas you travel between on an overworld, each with its own terrain and its own resources, which means expansion is a decision about where to go rather than a matter of walking further in one direction. It also means a group can genuinely split up.

And your base is not just a place to store things. Recruit settlers and give them tools and jobs, and they will work — mining, farming, hauling, defending the place while you are elsewhere. The settlement becomes a small production system that runs without you, and managing it well is most of the mid-game.

Buying and installing

It is a paid game, sold on Steam, inexpensive relative to how many hours people put into it. It installs from the Library like anything else and it is small.

Hardware is not a conversation. A top-down 2D game runs on a laptop or an old desktop or something you found in a drawer.

Making the account is its own small job — our Steam guide covers it.

One thing to check before you buy for multiplayer reasons: the version your friends are on. Games in active development update frequently, and a client and a server running different builds will refuse each other. This is true of nearly every game in this genre and it is the single most common reason two people cannot play together.

The first few hours, honestly

The opening of this game is the weakest part of it, and knowing that in advance stops people quitting before it gets good.

You will spend the first stretch doing exactly what you have done at the start of every game like this. Chopping wood. Making a workbench. Hitting rocks. There is nothing surprising here and there is no way around it, and if you are looking for the settlement management the box promises, it is not yet visible.

Push through to the point where you can recruit and equip settlers. That is where the game becomes itself. Everything before it is the price of admission.

Two things make the early game faster. Build your first base somewhere with easy access to water and trees rather than somewhere scenic; you will replace it later anyway. And do not hoard materials for a better version of a thing you have not unlocked. Spend them.

Combat is aimed with the mouse and it is more demanding than the art style suggests. Enemies come at night, they come in numbers, and standing still to trade hits is how people die in the first week. Movement is most of the skill.

Underground is where the meaningful materials are, and underground is dark, cramped and full of things that were not there a minute ago. Take a light source and take more food than you think you need.

Co-operative play, and what it actually changes

Necesse in a group is a different game from Necesse alone, and the difference is not just that things die faster.

The settlement becomes viable much earlier. A settlement takes work to establish and returns that work slowly. Alone, it competes for time with everything else you want to do. With three people, one person can commit to it while the others are gathering the materials it needs, and the compounding starts much sooner.

Exploration parallelises. Because the world is divided into separate areas, a group can send people to different places and actually cover ground, rather than the usual co-operative pattern of four players walking in a line behind whoever knows where they are going.

Boss fights get easier in one way and harder in another. More damage, obviously. But the arena is shared, the projectiles do not care who they hit, and a group that has not agreed on who is doing what tends to lose to its own crowding before it loses to the boss.

The division of labour that works is boring and effective. One person owns the settlement. One owns exploration and mapping. One owns the equipment tier, which means being deliberate about who gets the good materials rather than everyone crafting a slightly better sword at once.

Connecting to a server

Two models, as with every game of this kind.

Somebody hosts from their client. One player opens their world to others and everybody joins. It takes no setup and it works, and it has the flaw every listen server has: the world exists only while that person has the game running. If they are asleep or at work or annoyed with you, nobody is playing.

A dedicated server. The world lives on a machine that stays on. The game supports this, and it is the right answer for any group that wants the settlement to keep running while people come and go — which, given that the settlement is the point, is most groups after the first week.

The specifics of obtaining and starting the server software depend on where you bought the game and what you are running it on, and the developer's own current documentation is the right reference for that rather than an article that will age. What does not change is the shape of the thing: a server process, a world file it owns, a port it listens on, and a settings file where you name it and decide whether it needs a password.

Joining is done from the game's multiplayer menu. You enter an address and a port. There is no developer console to type connect into — that convention belongs to the Source and Quake engine families, and this is not one of those.

Copy the port along with the address. A host running several small game servers on one machine cannot put them all on the same number, and an address without its port is not an address.

Listings collect on the game's hub, each one queried directly rather than reported by whoever runs it.

Public servers are not really what this game is for, and that is worth saying rather than pretending otherwise. A shared settlement with strangers in it is a different proposition from a shared shooting range. Almost everybody who plays this in multiplayer plays it with three or four people they already know, on a server one of them pays a few pounds a month for, and that is the arrangement the game is built around. If you are looking for a busy public world to drop into, this is not the genre that provides one.

Hosting for a group

If you are the person setting this up, the decisions are small and the game is undemanding.

A 2D game with a handful of players does not need a large machine. What it needs is to be reachable and to stay on. How many slots a game server needs is worth reading before you pay for capacity you will not use — for a game like this the honest answer is usually a very small number, and buying for twenty players when five will ever join is money spent on nothing.

Game server hosting costs covers the realistic range, and where to host matters less for a slow top-down game than for a shooter, though it still matters more than people expect once you have somebody joining from another continent.

If you intend to let anybody outside your group in, decide the entry rules before you advertise rather than after somebody has dismantled part of your settlement. Running a whitelist that people actually apply to covers the middle ground between a locked private server and an open one.

Problems

You cannot connect and the error mentions a version. Client and server builds differ. Update, or ask the host to.

The server runs mods and you do not have them. Everybody needs the same set at the same versions. This is universal across every game that supports modding, and it accounts for most failed joins that are not version mismatches.

Your settlers are not doing anything. They need the right tools and an assigned job and somewhere to store what they produce. A settler with no pickaxe is a person standing in a field.

Something keeps destroying your base while you are away. Settlements attract attention. Defences and armed settlers are part of the design rather than an optional extra.

Everything is too hard. The progression is gated behind bosses in the same way Terraria's is. If an area is killing you instantly, the answer is almost always a tier of equipment you have not made yet rather than a skill problem.

Where to go next

The closest relative by a distance is Terraria, which invented most of this structure and still has an enormous population and a modding scene to match. Core Keeper takes the same top-down loop underground and builds it around automation. Starbound is the version with planets instead of islands.

If the settlement layer is what appealed rather than the combat, Vintage Story rewards the same patience with a much slower and more demanding crafting curve, and Don't Starve Together is the cruel version of the same instinct.

For the same co-operative building idea in a first-person world, Valheim is the obvious next thing, and it runs small dedicated servers about as painlessly as anything on this site.

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