How to Install The Isle and Join a Server

You have been alive for three hours. You started as something the size of a chicken and you are now large enough that most things leave you alone, which took an entire evening of drinking from rivers, eating whatever you could catch, and running away from noises.

Then the server restarts badly, or you clip through some terrain, or something you did not see kills you in nine seconds. And you are a chicken again.

The Isle is the dinosaur survival game where you play the dinosaur, and the sentence above is not a complaint about it. It is the design. Losing hours of growth is the stake that makes the hours worth anything, and everyone who plays this game has made peace with that or stopped playing. Listings collect on the The Isle hub.

What the game actually is

You spawn as a juvenile of a species you chose, somewhere on a large island, alone. There is no inventory and no crafting. Nothing to build. There is hunger and thirst. There is stamina. And there is a growth percentage that climbs with every minute you stay alive.

Growing is the progression. A fully grown animal is not simply bigger — it has more health and more damage, it has the stamina to finish a chase, and it has a completely different relationship with everything else on the map. The distance between a juvenile and an adult of the same species is enormous, and the middle of that journey is where the game is most tense, because you are large enough to be worth eating and not large enough to argue.

Carnivores hunt and scavenge. Herbivores find specific plants and water and spend a great deal of time being nervous. Both spend more time listening than looking.

Communication is by calls. Each animal has a set of vocalisations bound to keys, used for finding your own species, warning of danger, and — this is the part that surprises people — negotiating with strangers. Two players who cannot type at each other work out an entire relationship out of roars and body position, and it works far more often than it should.

The two versions problem

The Isle has been rebuilt. The developers restarted the game on new foundations, and for a long stretch the older build stayed available alongside the new one. That means guides and videos about this game are frequently describing something other than what you are running.

Check which build a server is on before joining and before believing anything you read about the game, including this article. If a server's description mentions a branch name, that is what it means.

The rebuild is the one under active development and it is what most servers run now. The old build has its adherents, its own species list, and its own maps, and the people who prefer it prefer it strongly.

Buying and installing

It is a paid game on Steam and it is in early access, which here is not a formality. Expect bugs, expect patches that reset things, and expect the game to be a genuine work in progress rather than a finished product with an early-access label attached.No Steam account yet? Our Steam guide sorts that out.

It is also demanding. This is a large Unreal map with dense foliage, and foliage is the expensive part. If your framerate is poor, the settings to attack are draw distance and vegetation detail before anything to do with resolution.

Sound settings deserve a pass too, for the same reason they do in any game where hearing something before seeing it decides whether you live. Use headphones.

Your dinosaur lives on one server

This is the most important practical fact about multiplayer here and it decides everything about how you choose a server.

Your animal, its growth, and its progress are stored on the server you played on. They do not travel. Grow a raptor for four hours on one server and it exists on that server, and only there — connect somewhere else and you start again as a hatchling.

Two things follow.

Choosing a server is a real commitment. You are not picking a match. You are picking the place your progress lives, and switching costs you everything you had.

Server stability is a feature you are shopping for. A community that patches carefully, communicates about restarts, and does not wipe on a whim is worth far more than one with a nicer map rotation. The signals for that are the ones set out in what makes a server listing trustworthy — an active Discord, named administrators, published rules, some history behind it.

Choosing what to be

The species list is the closest thing this game has to a class select, and the choice is not cosmetic — it decides how long you spend being vulnerable, what you eat, and whether other players want you dead on sight before you have said anything to them.

Small species grow fast. You reach adulthood in a fraction of the time a large one takes, which means less invested and less lost. It also means that when you get there, you are a small adult in a world containing large ones.

Large species are a project. The growth is measured in hours of real time, and every one of those hours is one in which something can end it. The reward is being the thing everything else runs from, and the cost is that a single mistake at ninety per cent grown is an entire evening.

Diet decides your routine. Carnivores hunt and scavenge, which means moving toward other animals. Herbivores need particular plants and water, which means moving toward specific places. One of those is an aggressive routine and the other is an anxious one, and they suit different temperaments.

Senses differ. Species do not all perceive the same world, and what yours can detect — and what can detect you — is part of the choice. Working out what you can and cannot notice is genuinely most of the early learning.

The developers have been reworking growth and reproduction across the game's life, so what your server's build actually supports is a fair question to ask its community rather than to assume.

Server rules are the game

Public servers with no rules exist and they are a specific experience: everything attacks everything, groups of players kill anything they see, and nothing survives long enough to grow. Some people want that.

Most of the population is on servers with rulesets, and the vocabulary is worth learning before you get removed for breaking a rule you did not know existed.

No mixpacking. Grouping up with a species yours would not realistically associate with. This is the most commonly enforced rule in the game and the one new players break first, usually by accepting help from a friendly stranger of the wrong species.

No combat logging. Quitting mid-fight to save your growth. Universally banned and usually detectable.

Growth and location rules. Some servers restrict where adults may hunt, protect designated safe zones, or forbid killing juveniles.

Realism or roleplay rulesets. Servers that expect you to behave as the animal would — territory, packs of your own species, no killing without eating. These have the most invested communities and the most demanding standards.

Whitelisted servers are common at the serious end, and applying to one is a normal part of getting into this game properly. From the owner's side, our piece on running a whitelist people actually apply to explains why they bother; from yours, it explains what a good application looks like.

Connecting

The in-game server browser is the main route. Open the multiplayer list, let it populate, and expect it to be slow and occasionally wrong — refresh more than once before believing an empty result.

Filter by region first, because this is a game where a fight is decided by whether the other animal's position on your screen matches where it actually is. Then read names and descriptions rather than sorting by player count, because the busiest server is frequently the one with no rules.

Favourite the server you settle on immediately. Given that your entire progress lives there, losing the address is a genuinely bad afternoon, and the browser does not always surface a server you have played on before.

If the in-game list is being unhelpful, the Steam client's own server browser — under its View menu — will accept an address and add it to your favourites, and favourites added there generally show up in the game. It is a clumsy fallback and it works when the in-game refresh does not.

When a community gives you a direct address, use all of it including the port. Hosts running several servers on one machine have given each a different one, and an address without a port is the standard reason a direct connection quietly fails.

What to do on your first evening

Pick a small herbivore. Not because it is easy — it is not — but because it teaches you the map, the water sources, the plant types and the sound of things approaching, without also asking you to hunt.

Find water first. Thirst kills faster than hunger and new players die of it constantly.

Stay near cover. Open ground is where you are seen.

Do not trust a friendly adult. Sometimes it is genuinely protecting you. Sometimes it is waiting.

Read the server's rules before you do anything else. Twice, if it is a realism server. The rules here are longer and more specific than in almost any other game, and they are enforced.

Problems

The browser is empty. Refresh, clear every filter, refresh again. Filters persist between sessions.

You joined and you are underground or falling. Early access terrain. Reconnecting usually fixes it; occasionally it does not and that is what a support channel is for.

Your dinosaur is gone. Either a wipe, a patch that invalidated saved animals, or a crash between saves. A good server announces the first two in advance, which is the argument for choosing servers by community rather than by player count.

Terrible framerate. Foliage. Reduce vegetation and view distance first.

You have no idea what killed you. That is the game working. Listen more.

Elsewhere

If the animal survival loop appeals but the punishment does not, ARK and its remaster put dinosaurs in a game where you are a human taming them, with building, a much larger community, and far more forgiving progression.

If it is the tension you want rather than the dinosaurs, DayZ is the game that established this whole shape of thing — long survival, total loss, and other players as the actual threat. Rust does the same with a harder edge and organised groups.

And if you want a survival game where the community rules matter as much as the mechanics, Soulmask and Conan Exiles are both worth reading server descriptions for, because the ruleset decides the game there in exactly the way it does here.

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