previously known and used as a bash script that handled the deployment of a Space Engineers dedicated server, now it is documentation that should serve the same purpose in competent hands.
space engineers as a whole has been out for just shy of ten years, and in that time has spanned several major versions of .NET, which has caused server administrators and players and modders alike plenty of grief. these instructions should not be followed as a be-all, end-all, but instead taken as sort of a journal of one girl's failings to properly set a server up and getting tired of all the fragmented and outdated documentation around all of it, and writing her own guide.
it should also be noted that this is the single worst piece of server software i have ever used on any OS in the last fifteen years. it's like someone has decided to take all accepted software development methods and throw them clean out the window. it's insane. it's bad. do better, keen. we certainly deserve it.
- a machine with at the absolute least 8 cores with more than 3GHz apiece, and 16GB of RAM, along with PLENTY of storage space. north of 300GB is a good starting point but depending on how big your server is you'll want more. most of it is gonna be in asteroids/planets and server backups.
- the most recently-supported version of debian by WineHQ. at time of writing this is debian 11 "bullseye", but again, anything supported as "recent" by them will work fine.
- a brain (although i did most of this without one, it still helped in the end)
apt install ufw
ufw allow 22/tcp # obviously, if your ssh port is different, adjust this
ufw allow 27016
ufw allow 8766
ufw enablepresently the only ports used by the game by default are the following:
8080- vRage remote management interface - you can leave this firewalled and access it via SSH tunnel27016- main game port. if clients can't initiate UDP "connections" to it, they will simply fail to connect with no errors in the log.8766- steam outgoing communications port - this is used to talk to steam to get the server listed.
this isn't gonna be covered here. you'll want to follow the latest instructions off of here for that:
some other dependencies that're required:
cabextract- used by winetricks for installing our windows dependencies.tmux- terminal multiplexer. when the server's run inside it, you can detach from the server safely without breaking anything, and you'll be able to login and see the console directly, even though you can't really run commands through it.iotop- disk i/o usage monitor. sorta advanced. helps you track if your server's slowing down due to lots of disk reads/writeshtop- system resource usage monitor. fairly easy to understand once you familiarize yourself. also, it's very colorful. very important feature.
currently the most reliable and simple way to do X11 forwarding on windows is with PuTTY and Xming, with your server forwarding display offset 10 to you:
- install Xming display server on your windows client from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
- install PuTTY on your windows client- you should already be using it to access stuff but in case you aren't: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html
- start Xming display server:
- use Multiple Windows mode
- set Display number to 10
- hit Next & Finish until the icon shows up in your system tray.
- start PuTTY, but don't login just yet:
- load your session profile for your server
- go down to Connection > SSH > X11 in the settings
- Check the box that says "Enable X11 forwarding"
- set "X display location" to
localhost:10
- login to your server as root (this time) and edit file
/etc/ssh/sshd_config:- scroll all the way to the bottom and add the following (or uncomment the ones already there):
X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
- after that:
- restart sshd (
service sshd restart) - log out
- restart sshd (
- login to your server as your game server user (and make sure no other SSH or PuTTY sessions are open on your local machine)
- run xeyes to see if it worked:
DISPLAY=:10 xeyesit should pop up some really BIG googly eyes that look like they're straight out of 1995 that follow your mouse around. this means it's working.
sshd_config's X11DisplayOffset, Xming's display number, and PuTTY's X display location ALL MUST MATCH. further parts of this tutorial will assume you kept display offset 10 and didn't deviate.
if you're virtualizing with Proxmox or another reasonably modern solution, you should be able to just outright install a window manager of your choice and complete part two through noVNC or whatever solution your virtualization solution offers for KVM without display forwarding. it'll also be quite a bit faster as wine won't hang the installer waiting for your connection to sync up with your locally-running X server.
this part will cover more of the finicky parts of the setup, but it's also the most critical part. if any step of this fails, the server won't run. at all.
up until now, all of this has assumed you're either root or running all of these commands with sudo- now is the time to switch to the user that'll be running the server.
in my case i chose a very inventive username: spaceengineers
log out of PuTTY completely and back in as spaceengineers or whatever you chose, and try to run DISPLAY=:10 xeyes and make sure it works alright. gotta love those googly eyes. 👀
moving on.
(it's a very cool bash script with years and years of love and work, but it's not an actual install, per se.)
(more in-depth here: https://wiki.winehq.org/Winetricks )
in essence, download this someplace rewritable, because it may need to be updated as the game's requirements change, or if you need to redo your entire wine prefix:
wget -O ~/winetricks https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x ~/winetricksthis will be really simple: in essence we want to have wine create the directories it needs to run, and also allow us to make sure that we're pretending to be the right version of windows:
DISPLAY=:10 winecfgit'll take a few seconds to show up and flood the living daylights out of your SSH terminal, but once it shows up, at the bottom of the window it should say Windows Version: and then a dropdown. Even if it already says "Windows 7", click it, select "Windows 7" again, and hit "OK".
this is where the server will put its logs, and where your world will reside, so make sure it gets backed up regularly.
mkdir ~/server-datathis is gonna be the most critical part. if it fails at any step or can't install something, you're screwed.
cd ~
export DISPLAY=:10
WINEDEBUG=fixme-all ./winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vcrun2013 vcrun2017 dotnet48this will sit in your console for a bit and spam various downloads and silent installs, then for some it may present you an actual install wizard to click through.
mkdir ~/steamcmd
cd ~/steamcmd
wget https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/client/installer/steamcmd_linux.tar.gz
tar -zxvf steamcmd_linux.tar.gz
./steamcmd.sh +quitthis should cause it to update itself once, then quit. if it drops you at a prompt that looks like this:
Steam>
just type quit and hit enter and move on to the next step.
mkdir ~/server-files
# this next part assumes your spaceengineers userfolder is /home/spaceengineers/ - if this isn't the case, adjust to match your setup- steamcmd doesn't understand ~ equalling your userfolder!
~/steamcmd/steamcmd.sh +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +force_install_dir /home/spaceengineers/server-files/ +login anonymous +app_update 298740 validate +quitthis will take some time. it will download and validate that the dedicated server downloaded properly afterwards. run it twice if you're extra paranoid.
spoiler alert: it will crash. that's expected. the GUI for SEDS presently does NOT function under WINE and i do not expect it to get better. if you're having different results, great! but when i tried to use the GUI through X11 forwarding it freaked out and flew off the upper right of my screen, never to return, then crashed.
cd ~/server-files/DedicatedServer64/
DISPLAY=:10 WINEDEBUG=fixme-all wine SpaceEngineersDedicated.exe -console -path "Z:\\home\\spaceengineers\\server-data\\"the server will sort-of start, then just crash saying it can't find a world, and then sit there at "Press Enter to continue" - hit Enter a few times and give it a minute- this is truly some foolish behavior on Keen's part but it will lock your whole terminal up completely for several seconds while it thinks about dying. just let it, and hope this bug gets patched while you wait for it to drop you back to your shell. that's what i do.
you'll want to do this by installing the dedicated server on your local machine, then using the configurator to create a world and a SpaceEngineers-Dedicated.cfg that we'll modify and upload.
presently, the server won't work with its GUI properly, and instead crash! you have to install the DS on your windows machine and do it that way!
presently the two current ways to limit access to a server from the game is to tell the server to use a Steam Group or to password it, with offenders to your rules (if you have any) being removed from the group or the password changed - i think recently the /ban command was added.
if you choose to tie the server to a steam group, and manage access that way, here's a way to get the Steam64 ID of your steam group (which is required for SEDS to understand your group's membership)
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/[your group's custom URL]/memberslistxml/?xml=1
it will be right at the top, in <GroupID64> tags
if you choose to password it, obviously, write the password down somewhere, because it is now encrypted and unretrievable (without significant work) in the configuration
once you've created and saved your world and configuration you'll need to make a few edits to SpaceEngineers-Dedicated.cfg:
<IP>[your machine's IP address]</IP>
<LoadWorld>Z:\home\[the user that is running the server]\server-data\Saves\[your world folder]\Sandbox.sbc</LoadWorld>[your machine's IP address]CANNOT be left as0.0.0.0for reasons unknown. you must set it to the machine's IP address as retrieved fromifconfigor the server will refuse to start, saying it can't bind address0.0.0.0- eons ago this was suspected to be some sort of WINE bug with regards to .NET compatibility but who knows.[the user that is running the server]- in our case will be justspaceengineers[your world folder]- must match the world folder's name. i shortened mine toworldwhen i uploaded it to the server.
if you did X11 display forwarding, you'll want to install Xvfb for a headless X session, then run the server under X11 display offset 0 (DISPLAY=:0) instead of 10
that way when you exit your SSH session the server won't freak out and crash.
cd ~/server-files/DedicatedServer64
DISPLAY=:0 WINEDEBUG=fixme-all wine SpaceEngineersDedicated.exe -noconsole -ignorelastsession -path "Z:\\home\\spaceengineers\\server-data\\"
it's recommended to run this inside a tmux session so you can view the server console while it's running.
presently the only way to control the server is from either in-game or via the VRageControlClient that's packaged with the game.
follow the guide on winehq a little closer, maybe you forgot to enable 32-bit packages?
"my server is up and my firewalls are correct and all my network configs are working, but i still can't connect!"
some providers (namely OVH) filter UDP packets without a TCP connection alongside it on the same port - ensure you've allowed your server's port through your provider's firewall as well as your machine's own firewall
"i get 003b:err:mscoree:CLRRuntimeInfo_GetRuntimeHost Wine Mono is not installed when trying to start the server!"
this means WINE tried to use its own install of mono that they maintain to run a .NET program, which means dotnet48 didn't install properly. most common thing that causes this is using winetricks -q to install, or not properly setting $DISPLAY or having your X11 forwarding setup properly. test that it's working with xeyes. dotnet and winetricks are a little odd in that they don't explicitly obey $DISPLAY if you haven't set it properly- normally your SSH client will handle this, but if not try the following, adjusting to match your display offset if you changed it:
export DISPLAY=:10
WINEDEBUG=fixme-all winetricks dotnet48 (export modifies the environment variables a little more permanently until your terminal session ends.)
- original information from Andy_S and NolanSyKinsley of the #space-engineers IRC channel on Esper for their information, way back when
- Indigo, NikolasMarch, mkaito, and mmmaxwwwell for their assistance and inspiration to write all this up.