Operation: Harsh Doorstop is a free-to-play tactical shooter sandbox built by Drakeling Labs, a team formed from developers of the cancelled Project Reality 2. It hit Steam Early Access in February 2023 and the pitch has not changed since: the game is free, forever, with no storefront and no paid unlocks.
Combat is slow, deliberate, and punishing. You move as a squad, call contacts over local, squad, and command voice channels, and take ground by suppressing it first. The fortification system lets you drop sandbags and defensive positions on the spot, and supply lines keep a push alive, so holding an objective is an engineering problem as much as a shooting one. Vehicles and combined arms turn a stalled front into a flank.
Most of what people play is community made. Steam Workshop carries thousands of maps, weapons, vehicles, factions, and full total conversions, so a server can change its entire identity with one mod list. Sessions run across single-player missions, co-op against bots, and full PvP multiplayer, which is why crews keep a box online instead of restarting a listen server every night. On a private dedicated Operation: Harsh Doorstop server, your group owns the mod list, the map rotation, the bot count, and who gets in.
Operation: Harsh Doorstop runs its whole mod scene through the Steam Workshop, so a server pulls custom maps, weapon packs, vehicle sets, and total conversion mods straight from a collection. Community favourites lean on World War II and Cold War conversions, custom faction packs, and original game modes, and admins usually publish a curated Workshop collection so every player downloads the same content on join.
Operation: Harsh Doorstop is an Unreal Engine shooter, so it leans on the CPU first. High-frequency CPUs hold tick rate steady when a full server, a bot wave, and a stack of built fortifications land at the same time. NVMe SSD storage keeps Workshop downloads and map loads quick, and DDR5 RAM scales the box from a small co-op session up to a packed 16-slot server with a heavy mod list. Pick your plan by player count and how much Workshop content you plan to run.
| Server type | RAM needed | Players | Recommended plan |
|---|
| Small co-op squad | 3 GB | Up to 6 | 3 GB plan |
| Standard PvP server | 5 GB | Up to 12 | 5 GB plan |
| Full modded server | 8 GB | Up to 16 | 8 GB plan |
A private dedicated server hands your crew the whole panel: game mode, Workshop mod list, map rotation, bot count and difficulty, slot count, server password, and admin permissions. Unlike a player-hosted match, a dedicated Operation: Harsh Doorstop server stays online after you log off, so your mod collection and rotation are loaded and ready the moment the squad forms up.
Hosting with PingPlayers takes host advantage out of the fight, frees you from your own hardware, and holds tick rate through the heaviest firefights. Every plan includes high-performance hardware, full config control, automated backups, 24/7 human support, and Ping AI, which installs Workshop content, applies recommended settings, and clears common setup errors for you.
