Terraria server requirements

A Terraria dedicated server is one of the lightest in the genre — the whole thing runs in less memory than most games want for a menu. There are two questions to answer, not one: how many people will be on at once, which sets the slot count, and how big the world will get, which sets the memory.

The figures below are for the dedicated server only. Players run the game on their own machines and need nothing from the host beyond a reachable address — including when you run plugins.

Memory

1 GB for a small group, 2–4 GB for a busy large world

Terraria is unusually light and this is where most people over-buy. A few friends on a medium world are comfortable in 1 GB. What pushes it up is not the headcount but the world: a large map that has been widely explored, heavily built on and filled with chests and NPCs holds more in memory than a fresh one, and it does not come back down. Plugins add on top rather than replacing that cost.

Processor

1–2 cores, clock speed over core count

World simulation is single-threaded, so one fast core beats four slow ones and extra cores buy almost nothing. This is why a cheap VPS advertising many weak vCores often runs a Terraria world worse than a smaller machine with a modern processor.

Disk

2 GB, plus room for backups

Trivially small by modern standards. The server is a few hundred megabytes and even a large world file is single-digit megabytes. The reason to ask for headroom is backups: TShock’s rolling backups plus a retention window of a few days accumulate, and disk is the cheapest of the three to over-provision.

Players

8, 16 or 32 — sizing, not a cap

Terraria imposes no ceiling of its own, and neither do we: the deploy passes no -maxplayers at all, so nothing turns the ninth player away on the smallest plan and MaxSlots in TShock is yours to set. The number on a tier is what its CPU and memory serve comfortably. Practically, past roughly 16 the constraint is bandwidth and how much of the map is loaded at once.

Network

TCP 7777, and that is genuinely all

One TCP port for the game, with no separate query port and no UDP — which makes Terraria one of the simplest games to forward for. TCP 7878 is optional and only needed if you run TShock’s REST API, which is what lets a panel read the live player list. Bandwidth is modest; latency to your players is what they feel.

Operating system

Linux or Windows, 64-bit, plus a .NET runtime

Re-Logic ship the dedicated server for both. Linux is the usual choice for a hosted server because it costs less to run and the container images are better maintained. TShock needs a .NET runtime installed alongside it. Nothing about a world file is platform-specific, so a .wld moves between them unchanged.

Size by the group, then check the memory

Start with the group, because it is what the CPU and memory of a tier were chosen to serve. It is not a gate: Terraria imposes no ceiling of its own and this site passes no-maxplayerseither, so nothing turns the ninth player away on an 8-slot plan. Pick the tier your group fits comfortably rather than the one that merely admits them.

Memory is then a separate axis, and it moves with the world rather than the headcount. The server simulates what has been built, what has been explored and what is sitting in chests whether the group is online or not. A duo on a large world they have been mining through for a year can want more RAM than a full group on a world generated this morning.

So the order is: choose the tier by the group, then look at what that tier gives you in memory and ask whether the world you have in mind is a modest one or a long-running project. If it is the latter, go one tier up for the RAM rather than for the slots.

The port, singular

Terraria is refreshingly simple here compared with the rest of the genre. There is no query port, no UDP and no port range — just one TCP port.

TCP 7777 is the game port, the one players type into “Join via IP”, and it is all a normal server needs. TCP 7878 is optional: it is TShock’s REST API, which lets an external panel read the live player list and issue commands. It is token-protected and off by default, so do not open it without setting a token first.

If your server is running but nobody can join, the troubleshooting page works through the causes in the order that finds it fastest.

What plugins change

Less than you would expect on the hardware, and nothing at all for your players. TShock plugins run server-side only, so everyone joining uses the unmodified game — there is no version-matching to coordinate and nobody gets kicked for having the wrong build. That is the quiet advantage Terraria has over client-side modding.

On memory, a handful of quality-of-life plugins is close to free; a large economy or region system on a mature world is the case that outgrows the smallest tier. The thing that actually bites is version drift — a plugin built for an older TShock can throw on load and take the server with it. Running a TShock server covers what to check and when.

Every plan here meets the requirements above

All three tiers publish the game port, install TShock with its plugin folder on your volume, and take hourly world backups. They differ on slots, memory and processor — the three things that actually decide how a Terraria world runs.

See the plans

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