The Forest is an open-world survival horror game developed and published by Endnight Games. After a plane crash leaves you stranded on a remote peninsula, you fight to stay alive against a clan of cannibals and the mutated creatures that lurk in the caves below.
The core loop runs on the day-night cycle. Daylight is for chopping trees, hunting, and crafting, while nightfall brings the cannibals to your camp. Building a base, lighting it with fire, and warding off attacks with effigies keeps the threat in check. The deeper cave systems hold the strongest mutants and the gear you need to push the story forward.
The Forest plays solo or in online co-op with friends. Saves are persistent, so your base, supplies, and story progress carry over between sessions. On a private dedicated server, the world stays live around the clock so any survivor can drop in and keep going without waiting for the host.
The Forest ships with built-in co-op and a flexible difficulty system covering Peaceful, Normal, and Hard modes. While the base game has no official mod loader, server admins still get deep control over enemy aggression, building rules, and player limits straight from the control panel, with no external tools needed.
On the hardware side, The Forest servers lean on single-core CPU performance to keep tick rates stable when a cannibal pack swarms a base. NVMe storage speeds up save writes and world loading. A 3 GB plan handles small co-op groups, while larger survival crews running long persistent saves benefit from the 8 GB plan.
| Server type | RAM needed | Players | Recommended plan |
|---|
| Small co-op (1-4 players) | 3 GB | Up to 4 | 3 GB plan |
| Standard group (4-6 players) | 5 GB | Up to 6 | 5 GB plan |
| Large survival crew (6+ players) | 8 GB | 6+ | 8 GB plan |
Running The Forest on a dedicated server means your save persists between sessions, your base stays intact, and admin tools give you control over difficulty, enemy aggression, and player slots. No survivor has a connection advantage because there is no local host holding the save.
PingPlayers pairs dedicated hardware with Ping AI, which handles server setup, config questions, and troubleshooting so your crew spends time surviving and exploring rather than wrestling with server files.
