How to Install Unturned and Join a Server

People bounce off Unturned in the store page. It is free, it is made of blocks, the characters have no faces, and the obvious conclusion is that somebody has cloned a survival game in a weekend for children.

The obvious conclusion is wrong, and it has been wrong for over a decade. Underneath the art style is a survival game with a deeper server-side modding culture than most paid titles in the genre, a set of hand-built maps that took years each, and a population that has kept it going through the entire rise and fall of the survival boom it was born into.

It also costs nothing, which removes the only real reason not to find out. Listings collect on the Unturned hub.

Getting it

Free on Steam.Our Steam guide covers the bit before this one — making and securing the account.

There is a paid upgrade available that adds cosmetic items and access to servers flagged for it. It is not required to play, and nothing about the core game is behind it. Ignore it until you know whether you like the game.

Hardware is barely a consideration. The art style is not an accident of budget — it means the game runs on machines that cannot run anything else in this genre, which is a large part of why it has the audience it does. A laptop is fine.

The one thing that does cost you is Workshop content, which is covered further down and which is where the disk space goes.

The maps, and which one to start on

Unturned does not have a map. It has maps, several of them built by the developer over years, and they differ enough to be almost separate games.

Prince Edward Island is the starting map and it is genuinely the right place to start. Small and forgiving, with few hostile players on it, and it will teach you the systems without killing you constantly.

Washington is the step up. Bigger, with better loot and considerably more to do, and it is the map most people spend their first hundred hours on.

Russia and Yukon are the harder end. Yukon in particular introduces cold as something you have to manage rather than a visual effect, and a player who wanders into it from Prince Edward Island in a t-shirt learns that quickly.

Hawaii and Germany each do their own thing with layout and loot distribution.

Community maps on the Workshop go considerably further, and a good one is indistinguishable in quality from the official ones.

Which map a server runs is the first fact about it, ahead of both the rules and the plugins. Check it before joining, because dropping into an unfamiliar large map with no equipment is a slow start.

The systems worth understanding early

Skills are bought with experience. You earn experience by killing things and by doing useful work, and you spend it on a tree that makes you better at specific activities. This is a real progression system and the choices matter — spreading points evenly across everything is the beginner mistake.

Loot is where the buildings are. Towns and military positions and specific structures each have their own loot tables, and learning which building type contains what is most of the early game's skill. A player who knows the map is not luckier than you. They are going to the right places.

Base building is a real system. Foundations and walls and storage and locks and vehicle security all exist, and on a PvP server the quality of your base is the difference between keeping what you found and donating it.

Vehicles change the game. A working vehicle turns the map from a walking simulator into something you can actually operate in, and on a busy server the good ones are contested.

Servers are the whole game

This is the part that matters and it is the part the store page cannot convey.

Unturned's servers are not variations on one experience. Server owners run plugin frameworks that let them change almost anything, and the results are wildly different from each other: roleplay economies with jobs and currencies, kit-based arena servers, heavily modded survival with custom weapons and vehicles, faction warfare, near-vanilla purist servers with nothing added at all.

The practical consequence is that "I tried Unturned and did not like it" usually means somebody played half an hour on one server. That is like judging Garry's Mod from a single sandbox map.

Filters in the in-game browser are how you narrow this down. The ones that matter most:

PvP or PvE. The single biggest determinant of what your evening looks like. A PvE server is a co-operative building and exploring game. A PvP server is an argument.

Map. Covered above.

Workshop content. Servers that require custom content will send it to you on join. This is normal and it is also why some servers take several minutes to enter the first time.

Player count. A server with nobody on it is not a quiet place to build; it is a server that has stopped.

Connecting to a specific server

The in-game browser is under the multiplayer menu and it works well by the standards of this genre. Real filters, a favourites list, a search that does what you expect.

To go straight to a specific machine, the multiplayer screen has a field for entering an address and a port directly. That is the route to use when somebody has given you a server from a listing or a community's chat, and it avoids the problem of trying to find one particular entry in a browser full of them.

Copy the port along with the address. Hosts run many servers on one machine and they cannot all sit on the same number, and an address without its port is not an address. There is no developer console to type connect into here — that convention belongs to the Source and Quake families and this game is not one of them.

Favourite anything you like. Server populations in this game are habitual, and the same people are on the same server at the same hour every week.

The hub is where listings collect, each queried directly rather than reported by whoever runs it, which is the difference between a measured player count and a claimed one. What makes a server listing trustworthy covers why that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Playing it with a few friends and nobody else

Public servers are one way to play this and they are not the only one, and for a group of four the private route is usually better.

Start in single-player first. The game has a proper offline mode, and an hour in it teaches you the map, the loot buildings and the controls without anybody stealing your car. Nothing about this is wasted time; map knowledge transfers directly.

Then set up something shared. The game supports running a server separately from anybody's client, which is the arrangement that matters for a survival game — the world keeps existing when the person who started it goes to bed, and the base you spent Saturday on is still there on Wednesday.

That is a small job and a small machine. A game this light does not need much, and the decisions that matter are about where the box sits and how many slots you pay for rather than about raw specification. If you go down this route, decide the rules before you advertise anything rather than after somebody has emptied the shared storage.

And if you do open it up, the hardest part is not technical. A new server with nobody on it stays empty because nobody joins an empty server, and the way out of that trap is a group of people who have agreed to be there at a particular time. Why nobody joins your server is about that problem specifically, and it applies to this game more than most, because the browser is crowded and a new entry in it is invisible.

Workshop content, and how not to ruin your install

Subscribing to Workshop items loads them every time you start the game. That is fine for a handful of things and it is a problem for a hundred.

Two rules save you an evening.

You do not need to subscribe to anything to join a server. Servers send their required content automatically. Subscribing to a collection "for" a server is almost never necessary and sometimes actively breaks things by giving you a different version from the one the server expects.

Unsubscribe from what you are not playing. Long start-up times and crashes on join are nearly always a bloated subscription list. If the game has become slow, that is why, and the fix is to clear it out and add things back deliberately.

Problems

The server list will not load or is empty. Check your filters first. It is astonishing how often the answer is a leftover filter from last week.

Joining takes several minutes and shows a filename. Workshop content downloading. This happens once per server rather than once per join.

You are kicked immediately on joining. Some servers enforce a minimum Steam account age or playtime to keep throwaway accounts out. Nothing on your end changes that except playing elsewhere for a while.

Your base was destroyed while you were offline. PvP server behaving as designed. If you want that not to happen, the answer is a PvE server or one with offline raid protection, and both exist in quantity.

Everything is confusing and you keep dying. Start on the beginner map. Genuinely. The game is not hard once you know where things are, and it is punishing when you do not.

A plugin command does nothing. Servers run different plugin sets and there is no standard command list. If a server's own information does not tell you, ask in chat — there is no penalty for trying a command that does not exist.

Where to go next

If the survival loop is the appeal and you want it with more weight, DayZ is the game this genre grew out of, and the original mod is still running for anybody who wants to see where it started. Project Zomboid does the same thing from a top-down camera with far more simulation underneath it.

For base building against a scheduled threat, 7 Days to Die is the obvious one, and Rust is the version where the other players are the entire threat.

If what you actually liked was the server culture — the sense that every machine is somebody's own project with its own rules — then Garry's Mod is the game with the deepest version of exactly that, and Minecraft is the one with the largest.

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