How to Install Sunkenland and Join a Server

There is no ground. That is the first thing Sunkenland does to you and it reorganises every survival habit you have.

You cannot walk somewhere to find wood. You cannot dig a hole and hide in it. You cannot pick a defensible hill, because there are no hills — there is a scatter of small islands in a flooded world, a great deal of water between them, and everything worth having is either underneath that water or already occupied by somebody who will shoot you for approaching.

Sunkenland is a survival game built on that premise, and it is at its most interesting when a group of people is trying to hold territory in it. Listings collect on the Sunkenland hub. This guide covers what you are buying, how the multiplayer side works, and what to sort out before four people commit an evening to it.

Buy it knowing it is unfinished

The game is sold on Steam in early access, and that is not a footnote.

Early access means the content changes, the balance changes, and occasionally the shape of the game changes. It also means that a long-running server can be invalidated by an update, and that a guide written today will describe some things that have moved by the time you read it. That is the deal, and going in aware of it is the difference between enjoying the game and feeling cheated by it.

The practical consequences for a group are worth stating plainly. Check the version everybody is on before an evening rather than during it. Expect that a major update may want a fresh world. And do not build the thing you are emotionally attached to on a server you do not control.

Our Steam guide is the prerequisite read if Steam is unfamiliar.

Hardware sits in the middle. This is a modern game with water rendering, which is one of the more expensive things a game can do, and it will use a decent machine. It is not an old shooter you can run on anything.

The loop, honestly

The core is salvage. Go under the water, find something worth having, bring it up, turn it into something better.

Around that sit the things every survival game has — hunger, thirst, durability, a crafting tree that opens up as you find better materials. The specific twist is that a world made of sea makes fresh water and dry storage into problems rather than assumptions, and the early game is largely about solving those.

Then there is the part that makes the game worth playing with other people: the islands are not empty. Factions hold positions with defended bases on them, and taking one is a proper operation rather than a looting run. That is where a group stops being four individuals each building a shack and becomes a group with a plan.

Base building happens on and around the water, which produces structures that look nothing like the wooden boxes you build in other games in the genre. Boats are how you get anywhere, and losing one a long way from home is a genuinely bad afternoon.

What the water actually changes

It is worth being specific about this, because "survival game but wet" undersells how differently it plays.

You cannot retreat on foot. In every other game in this genre, a fight going badly ends with you running into trees. Here the escape route is a boat you left somewhere, and if it is not where you left it, there is no escape route. That single fact makes every approach to a hostile island a commitment rather than a probe.

Distance is measured in journeys. The map is not a continuous space you traverse at a constant rate. It is a set of destinations with water between them, and a trip you make casually with a good boat is an ordeal without one. Losing your transport far from home is the characteristic disaster of this game.

Visibility works against you underwater. Below the surface you see less, hear differently and move more slowly than you do above it, and the thing you went down for is generally in the least convenient part of a wreck. Going under is always a decision with a cost attached.

Storage and structure are constrained. Building over water is not building on ground. What you can put where is limited by what will hold it up, and a base that grew organically without a plan runs into that limit at the worst moment.

The upshot for a group is that logistics matter here more than in most survival games. Somebody should own the boats. Somebody should be responsible for the thing everybody forgets, which is keeping a spare means of transport at the base rather than taking every vessel on the same expedition.

Co-op or against each other

A server's rules determine which game you are playing, and the two are not close.

Co-operative is four or five people against the world and its factions. This is the version most groups want, and it produces the best version of the raiding content, because a defended island base is a real problem for a coordinated team and a slaughter for an individual.

Player versus player turns the whole thing into a territory game, where other people's bases are the richest target on the map and the anxiety of leaving yours undefended is the point. This is the version with the shorter half-life and the more intense fortnight.

Check which one a server is before you join it and before you build anything. Discovering the answer experimentally is expensive.

Getting connected

Two routes in, and the second is the one worth setting up.

Somebody hosts from their own client. Fast to arrange, no configuration, and it carries the flaw every listen server has: the world exists only while the host has the game open. For a survival game where the entire appeal is a base that persists and improves, that is a real limitation rather than an inconvenience. If the host has a bad week, everybody's progress is on their hard drive and nobody can reach it.

A dedicated server. The world runs on a machine that stays on, and everybody connects to it whenever they like. This is what a group of four should be doing by the second week.

Joining is done through the game's own multiplayer menu, where you either pick a server from the list or enter an address directly. 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 games.

Copy the port 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, and each one is queried directly rather than reported by whoever runs it.

If you are the one hosting

The decisions here are small, and getting them wrong wastes money rather than breaking anything.

Size the server for the people who will actually play, not for the people who said they might. How many slots a game server needs is about exactly this, and for a co-operative survival game the honest number is nearly always smaller than the one you first thought of. Game server hosting costs covers what a small persistent world realistically costs.

Location matters more than specification for a group that mostly lives in one place — where to host covers why, and the short version is that everybody's inputs travel to the same box and the box should be near most of them.

And decide early whether strangers are welcome. An open early-access survival server is a specific kind of commitment: people will turn up, some of them will be a problem, and moderating it is a job. Running a whitelist that people actually apply to is about the middle path between a locked private server and an open one, which is where most groups end up.

Take backups. This deserves its own sentence because early-access games and world corruption have a long shared history, and a group that loses forty hours of building generally does not come back.

What a first session should look like

For four people who have never played, this ordering removes most of the frustration.

Get everybody on the same server and in the same place before anybody starts gathering. Groups that scatter in the first ten minutes end up with four half-finished camps.

Solve water and food before anything ambitious. They are the constraints that will stop you, and they stop you at the least convenient moment.

Build one shared base rather than four private ones. It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, and it is the single biggest determinant of whether the group is still playing in a fortnight.

Do not attempt a defended faction island on the first evening. Look at one. Note where the approaches are. Come back when you have equipment.

And agree who is allowed to take things out of shared storage, because that argument has ended more survival-game groups than any raid ever has.

Problems

A friend cannot join. Version mismatch first. Early access games update frequently and Steam will have updated one of you and not the other.

The server list is empty or thin. Small game, small population, and a lot of the actual play happens on private servers that are not advertised anywhere. The communities directory is more useful than a list here.

Poor performance around water. Water rendering is expensive. Turn its quality down before touching anything else, then reflections.

Your base was gone when you came back. Either a PvP server behaving as designed, or an update that changed something structural. Backups are the answer to the second one and there is no answer to the first except better walls.

You drowned. Everybody drowns. Watch the surface distance rather than the thing you are trying to reach.

Where to go next

If the survival-and-build loop is the appeal, Valheim remains the most reliable small-group version of it and runs tiny dedicated servers cheaply. Sons of the Forest is the closest in tone. Soulmask and Enshrouded both layer heavier building and progression on the same idea.

If the territorial pressure was the interesting part rather than the survival, Rust is the extreme version and the one everything else in this genre is measured against, and 7 Days to Die applies a scheduled, escalating threat to a base you have to keep improving.

For the session-based version with an actual ending, Icarus drops you onto a planet with a deadline and takes the character away if you miss it.

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