How to Install Team Fortress Classic and Join a Server

The first thing that happens to a new Team Fortress Classic player is that somebody crosses the entire map faster than should be possible, takes the flag out of a defended basement, and is gone again before you have finished deciding which class to be.

That was not a cheat and it was not a mod. That was a Scout throwing a grenade at his own feet and riding the blast, and it is the mechanic the whole game is built around. There are 46 servers listed here, which is both a small number and a startling one for something that shipped in 1999.

Team Fortress Classic is where Team Fortress 2 came from. Playing it now is mostly a lesson in how much the sequel took out.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Team Fortress Classic, which is sold on Steam and is cheap
• Under a gigabyte of disk space

Check your library before you buy anything. TFC has been folded into so many Half-Life bundles over twenty-five years that a great many people already own it without knowing.

If Steam itself is new to you, our guide to installing Steam covers account creation and the security settings worth changing before you own anything.

There is no hardware section. The game targets machines that were mid-range when the euro was new.

Where this game came from

Team Fortress began as a Quake modification in the mid-nineties, written by an Australian team who were later hired by Valve. The Half-Life version arrived in 1999 under the name Team Fortress. It only became Classic retroactively, when the sequel needed the shorter name.

That history explains a store listing which reads like a remaster and is not one. It also explains why TFC installs into the same folder as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. All three followed the same path — volunteer mod, absorbed by Valve, sold as a product — and all three still have people playing them.

The nine classes, and why they are not the nine you know

TF2 kept the roster and rebuilt the behaviour. If you arrive from the sequel expecting familiar tools, almost none of them work the way you remember.

Scout is fast and made of paper. He carries the concussion grenade, which is a movement tool before it is a weapon, and he can disarm an enemy Demoman's detpack.

Sniper has a charging rifle and a visible laser sight. Everyone can see the dot. That trade — perfect information for the shooter, perfect warning for the target — is the whole balance of the class, and TF2 dropped it.

Soldier carries the rocket launcher and rocket jumps with it. This is the one mechanic that survived into the sequel intact.

Demoman has pipe bombs he detonates remotely, and a detpack: a timed charge that blows open walls. Several maps are built with specific walls meant to be opened this way, which is a level design idea almost nothing does any more.

Medic heals teammates and infects enemies. His melee attack gives the other team a disease that spreads person to person and keeps damaging them while it does. He is also quick, and dangerous in a straight fight, which is not a sentence anybody writes about the TF2 Medic.

Heavy Weapons Guy spins up an assault cannon and moves at roughly the speed of regret.

Pyro carries a flamethrower and an incendiary cannon. Burning in TFC hurts far more than burning in TF2 does.

Spy disguises as the enemy team, backstabs with a knife, and can feign death — drop to the floor as a convincing corpse, wait for people to walk past, stand up. TF2 replaced feigning with the cloak, and something was lost.

Engineer builds a sentry gun and a dispenser, then upgrades and repairs both by hitting them with a spanner. His class grenade sets off the ammunition other players are carrying, which is a strange and very effective thing to throw into a defended room.

The grenades decide everything

Every class carries two grenade types. One is the generic fragmentation grenade. The second belongs to the class, and the second one is where the game lives.

Concussion grenades do almost no damage. What they do instead is throw everybody nearby, including the person who threw it, and scramble the screen of anyone caught in the blast. Scouts and Medics use them on themselves deliberately, and a player who has practised this covers ground at a speed that looks broken until you understand it.

Nobody good at this game moves normally. Watch a populated server for five minutes and you will see people arriving by routes that appear to have no floor.

This is not an exploit and it is not a plugin. It is the skill ceiling, it takes weeks to get comfortable with, and it is the single largest reason TFC does not feel like its sequel.

Installing it

Find it in your Steam library and install. The files land under steamapps/common/Half-Life, in a folder named tfc.

If you also own Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, those sit in the same place under their own folder names. All of these games are Half-Life mods that Valve absorbed, so they share one installation root, and installing any of them gives you a Half-Life directory whether you wanted one or not.

You will want that path later. Custom maps, sprays and configuration files all go inside tfc.

Turn on the console first

Right-click the game in your library, open Properties, and put this in the launch options:

-console -novid

-console gives you the developer console. You need it to connect to a server by address, and every piece of troubleshooting advice ever written for a GoldSrc game begins with opening it.

-novid skips the intro. On a high-refresh monitor add -freq with your own refresh rate, because the engine will otherwise decide you own a CRT and leave you at 60 Hz.

Launch once, let the first-run setup finish, and press the tilde key to check the console appears.

Fix your network rates

The GoldSrc network defaults were chosen for modems and were never revisited. Open the console and enter:

rate 25000
cl_updaterate 101
cl_cmdrate 101

That asks the server for a hundred and one updates a second instead of the ancient default. A server that cannot support those values clamps you down silently, so there is no way for this to hurt you. On a server that can, hit registration improves the moment you do it.

This is the first thing to do in every GoldSrc game. In a game where half the population is airborne, it matters more than most.

Finding somewhere to play

There is no matchmaking. No queue, no rank, no button that decides for you. You choose a specific machine belonging to a specific person and you connect to it.

The in-game browser is under Find Servers, on the Internet tab. It sorts badly and populates slowly, but with a population this size the whole list is readable in about a minute, which is a real advantage over a game with four thousand servers.

The alternative is picking the server first. Our Team Fortress Classic list queries every entry directly on a fifteen-minute cycle, so the player counts are measured rather than claimed by the server itself, and each listing carries a copyable address.

Population in a game this size is concentrated and habitual. Two or three servers hold most of the players, and they fill in the evening in their own timezone. A server that looks abandoned at lunchtime is a different place at nine o'clock.

Connecting

Open the console, type connect, a space, then the full address:

connect 192.223.30.44:27015

Take the port with you. 27015 is the default, and any host running several servers on one machine has moved most of them elsewhere. Copying the IP alone is the commonest reason a connection attempt quietly fails.

Your first join to a customised server downloads its content one file at a time over the game connection, which is as slow as that description suggests. It happens once per map rather than once per session. Leave it running and it finishes.

Some servers refuse you at the last moment — a full slot count, a reserved admin slot, a plugin wanting a Steam account older than yours. Try the next one.

The browser has a Favourites tab that accepts an address directly, without needing to find the server in a list first. Use it. Four favourites in your own region is the difference between having somewhere to play and concluding the game is dead.

The maps

2fort is the centre of gravity here in a way that no single map is for most games. Two mirrored bases, a bridge between them, a sniper battlement above, water underneath, and the enemy flag sitting in a basement guarded by a sentry gun that an Engineer has been placing in the same corner since the Blair government.

Getting past that sentry is the game. Pipe bombs around a corner and rockets fired from cover are the honest answers. A conc-jumping Scout going over the top is the fun one.

The water is the part people forget. The moat under the bridge connects to both bases, it is a legitimate route in, and it is where a Scout who has just been concussed off the battlement tends to end up. Whether anybody is watching it is most of the difference between getting the flag and not.

dustbowl is the attack-and-defend map, fought across a sequence of stages where one team pushes and the other holds. TF2's version is a redesign of this one. hunted is stranger: a single defenceless target is escorted across open ground while one team guards him and the other team tries very hard to shoot him.

well, rock2, casbah and badlands fill out most rotations. A populated server is running 2fort more likely than not, and there is no shame in that being the map you learn.

What the sequel changed, and why it matters here

This is useful framing if you know TF2, because nearly every difference runs in the same direction.

TF2 removed grenades from every class. It removed the Sniper's laser, the Medic's infection, the Spy's feign death and the Demoman's detpack. It replaced the medkit with a healing beam. It gave every class a silhouette you can identify in a second from across a map.

All of that was deliberate and most of it worked. TF2 is legible. You can watch a fight and understand what happened.

TFC is not legible, and the people still playing it treat that as the point. A fight involves grenades arriving from off screen, a corpse on the floor that is about to stand up, and somebody who crossed two hundred metres in three seconds by detonating explosives underneath himself.

The practical advice: do not expect your TF2 instincts to carry over. Take Soldier or Heavy for a first evening, learn where the grenades come from, and treat this as a new game rather than an old version of a familiar one.

Settings that survive a restart

tfc/config.cfg is rewritten by the game every time you quit, so editing it directly wastes an evening.

Create tfc/userconfig.cfg instead and put anything permanent in there — your rate settings, your grenade binds, whatever aliases you end up writing. It runs on startup and survives updates.

Problems you will actually hit

"Steam validation rejected." A non-Steam client meeting a server that requires a real copy. If you bought the game and see this, verify the files through Steam's Properties menu.

Everything is stretched. Set the resolution and the aspect ratio yourself in Options, then Video. The game was built for 4:3 screens and will not work it out on its own.

The mouse feels wrong. Turn off mouse acceleration in Windows and set m_rawinput 1 in the console. This engine's mouse handling predates every convention you are used to.

You keep dying to a sentry you never saw. That is the Engineer doing his job. Spies and Demomen exist for this reason.

Server not responding. Check the port first. If our list also shows it offline, the machine is down and nothing you do locally will change that.

Where to go next

The full guide to Team Fortress Classic servers goes deeper into the surviving scene and what the remaining communities are like.

If the concussion grenades are the appeal, Fortress Forever is a Source engine reconstruction of this game built by people who wanted conc jumping back on a newer engine. Team Fortress 2 is the polished descendant, free, and enormously larger.

And if the engine suits you more than the game does, the rest of the GoldSrc survivors — Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Half-Life deathmatch and Condition Zero — use the identical console, the identical rate settings and the identical userconfig.cfg trick described here. Learning it once covers 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. Team Fortress Classic 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 Team Fortress Classic's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.