How to Install SCP: Secret Laboratory and Join a Server

Your first round will go like this. You spawn in an orange jumpsuit in a room full of other people in orange jumpsuits. Someone says the door is open. You walk out into a corridor, turn a corner, and there is a concrete statue with its hands over its face.

Four people start shouting the same word at once. Do not blink.

Then somebody does blink, and the statue is standing where they were, and they are not standing anywhere any more. That is SCP-173, and that is SCP: Secret Laboratory — a free, round-based, extremely loud multiplayer game about a containment facility going wrong, played almost entirely on servers run by other people. Listings collect on the game's hub.

The shape of a round

Everybody starts somewhere in a facility that has just suffered a breach.

Class-D are the disposable ones. You are a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit with no weapon, no keycard, no information, and your objective is to get out of the building. Most rounds have more Class-D than anything else, and most of them die.

Scientists start deeper in with better access and the same objective. Getting out is easier for them and there are fewer of them.

Facility Guards are armed and are trying to hold the place together. They start as the only people with weapons and they are outnumbered.

SCPs are the contained entities that are no longer contained. Each one plays completely differently from the others and from everybody else.

Then, some minutes in, both sides get reinforcements. The Nine-Tailed Fox arrive to retake the facility. The Chaos Insurgency arrive to take the Class-D out of it.

The elegant part is what happens when you escape. A Class-D who gets outside comes back as Chaos Insurgency. A Scientist who gets outside comes back as Nine-Tailed Fox. You do not leave the round when you win your objective — you re-enter it with a gun and a grudge.

The things trying to kill you

Six or so entities do most of the work, and each one requires you to behave differently. Learning them is the game's real progression, because there is no levelling.

SCP-173 only moves when nobody is looking at it. Keep it in view and it is a statue. Blink and it closes the distance instantly. So does turning around, and so does letting the last person watching it die. Groups survive it by taking turns to look.

SCP-096 is harmless until you look at its face. Then it screams, and then it comes for you specifically, through walls if necessary, and it will not stop. The correct response to hearing that scream is to look at the floor.

SCP-049 kills slowly and deliberately, and turns what it kills into more of itself. A single 049 that gets into a crowded corridor produces an army.

SCP-106 moves through the facility in ways that ignore its layout, and being caught by it does not simply kill you.

SCP-079 is a computer. It cannot chase anybody. What it can do is open doors, close doors, lock people into rooms, watch everything through the cameras — which is far more dangerous than it sounds, and which makes it the SCP most reliant on cooperating with the others.

SCP-939 cannot see. It hunts by sound, which means the proximity voice chat you have been using to coordinate is also the thing leading it to you.

Voice chat is the game

Proximity voice is not a feature bolted on. It is the mechanic everything else is built around.

You hear people near you. They hear you. That means every negotiation, every lie, every panicked warning shouted down a corridor is happening in the open, and half the memorable moments in this game are somebody talking their way out of being shot by four armed strangers.

There are radios for coordinating at distance, and the facility intercom, which broadcasts to everybody and is used roughly half the time for announcements and half for abuse.

Set your microphone up before your first round rather than during it. Play with headphones. Directional audio genuinely matters here — a great deal of what you need to know arrives as a noise from a direction rather than as anything on screen.

Two systems that force the round to end

Rounds do not drift. Two mechanisms push everybody together.

Decontamination. The lighter part of the facility floods on a timer, and anybody still in it dies. This is the game's way of preventing a stalemate where four people hide in separate cupboards for twenty minutes. When the announcements start, move.

The warhead. The facility can be armed to destroy itself. It is loud and it is announced, and it kills everybody who is neither outside the building nor in the right shelter. Arming it is a legitimate strategy for whichever side is losing, and it is also how spiteful people end rounds they were never going to win.

Both of these produce the game's characteristic rhythm: a slow, dark, quiet first few minutes, followed by everybody being funnelled into the same three corridors at once.

Installing it

SCP: Secret Laboratory is free on Steam. Install it from the Library and there is nothing else to buy.

If Steam itself is new, our installation guide covers making the account and securing it. Free games attract account theft the same as paid ones do.

Run it once and go through the settings before you look for a server. The three that matter: your microphone, your audio output, your brightness. The facility is dark by design, and a badly calibrated monitor makes it unplayable rather than atmospheric.

Read the keybindings too. There are more interactions in this game than a shooter usually has, and the difference between escaping and dying is frequently whether you knew which key opens a door while running.

Finding a server, which is the whole point

This game has no matchmaking worth the name and does not need one. It is played on servers run by communities, and which one you choose determines what game you are playing.

Filter by region first. Proximity voice is the core mechanic and it stops being a mechanic when nobody on the server speaks a language you share, so pick somewhere your own timezone plays. Latency matters too, particularly against SCP-173, where a fraction of a second of disagreement between your client and the server is the difference between alive and not — our piece on tick rate covers why that disagreement happens at all.

Then look at what the server is. The differences are enormous, and servers advertise them in their names.

Vanilla servers run the game as the developers made it. Start here. You need to know what the baseline is before you can tell what a modified server has changed.

Modified servers run community plugins, and the range is extreme — custom roles, custom items, changed round structures, entirely different game modes built on top of the base game. Some of these are excellent. Some are chaos.

Roleplay servers enforce staying in character, with rules about who may shoot whom and when. These have the strictest moderation of the three and the most patient regulars.

High-population servers change the maths completely. Twenty players and sixty players are different games. Sixty means the corridors are never empty. SCPs are outnumbered rather than dominant, and the whole thing runs closer to a riot than a horror film.

Read the rules before you play rather than after somebody tells you off. Our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy apply here as everywhere, and the general guide to picking servers covers the rest.

Connecting

The in-game server list is the ordinary route, with filters for region and player count. Sort by population and join something busy — this game does not work with six people in it.

If somebody has given you an address rather than a name, use the direct-connect option rather than trying to find the server by scrolling. Take the whole address including the port, because a host running several servers on one machine cannot give them all the same number, and copying only the part before the colon is the most common reason a working server appears unreachable.

Favourite anything you enjoy the first time you play on it. Server communities in this game are habitual — the same forty people on the same box every evening — and a server that feels lifeless at three in the afternoon is full at nine.

Most of those communities keep a Discord alongside the server, and joining it is how you find out about downtime, rule changes and the evenings when everybody has agreed to turn up at once. We wrote about how that arrangement became standard, and this game is one of the places it works best.

Things that will happen to you

You get killed in the first thirty seconds without understanding why. Normal. This game does not ease you in, and Class-D is meant to be precarious.

You are shot by your own side. Also normal. Nine-Tailed Fox shoot Class-D on sight, and a Class-D who picked up a uniform is a Class-D who will be shot faster.

A door will not open. Keycards are tiered. The one you have is not the one that door needs, and taking a better card off somebody who no longer requires it is a legitimate plan.

You are stuck somewhere with nothing happening. Move towards noise. Standing still is how rounds get long and how decontamination catches people.

Somebody is speaking and you cannot tell where from. Radio, intercom or proximity — they sound different, and learning to tell them apart is worth more than it sounds.

A round ends abruptly with a countdown. Somebody armed the warhead. This is a feature.

If you like this, the neighbours

Garry's Mod is the obvious relative, because Trouble in Terrorist Town does the same thing with lying — a group, a few traitors, proximity voice, everybody trying to work out who is telling the truth. Our gamemode guide explains which servers run what.

Barotrauma is the other one worth knowing: a submarine; a crew who need each other to survive; the possibility that one of them is working against the rest. It produces the same kind of story.

Both of those are paid games, and SCP: Secret Laboratory is not, which makes it the easiest one to get a group of people into on a Friday evening. That is a real advantage and it is why its servers stay busy.

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