The Riftbreaker Server Hosting

There are three ways to play Galatea 37 together – and they feel very different day to day:

Peer-to-peer co-op: one player hosts from inside the game, the others join via the server browser or a link. Free, but the host carries the full simulation load on top of their own game – and when they log off, the session ends for everyone.

Your own PC running the dedicated server app: EXOR offer the server app free on Steam (app ID 4114030, around 600 MB instead of the game's 11 GB+), and it can be downloaded anonymously via SteamCMD without a Steam account. Technically the clean solution – but it needs a machine that stays on, a port forward on your router, and manual work after every patch to realign the server and game versions.

A rented server at RespawnHost: the same official server app, pre-configured, with automatic updates and backups, no port forwarding and no box humming in your living room – billed by the second on modern AMD Ryzen hardware.

By default the server app opens a small window with basic options. For datacenter operation it runs fully headless with the launch parameters cli=1 config=config.cfg and reads everything from the config file. These are the lines that matter:

RCON in The Riftbreaker works from inside the game: set server_rcon_password on the server, type server_rcon_password YourPassword in the client console, and run commands as rcon [command]. Handy for adjusting things mid-session without kicking anyone out.

Our RAM guidance: the Story Campaign for two runs comfortably on Scout with 4 GB (8.00 €/month), four players with mid-size bases are well served by Outpost with 6 GB, large survival runs belong on Rift Station with 8 GB, and endgame saves with megastructures and many active outposts want Megastructure with 12 GB (21.60 €/month). Ports are assigned automatically – IP and port are shown in the web interface, and router port forwarding is never needed.

• set app_mode "server" – mandatory. Without it the app waits for a menu that never appears in headless mode and hangs on the loading screen
• set campaign – the game mode: open/open for the Open Campaign, mp_story/mp_story for the Story Campaign, mp_survival/mp_survival for Survival
• set mission – the starting map. Open Campaign: campaigns/open/headquarters_jungle, _metallic, _acid, _ice, _swamp, _caverns, _desert. Survival: survival/jungle, survival/acid, survival/desert, survival/magma, survival/ice, survival/metallic, survival/caverns, survival/swamp, survival/swamp_lakes. The Story Campaign does not need this line – it always begins in the Tropical Zone
• set difficulty – also mandatory, and different per mode: easy / normal / hard / brutal in the Open Campaign, coop_campaign_easy through coop_campaign_brutal in the Story Campaign, coop_easy through coop_brutal in Survival
• set server_max_players_count "4" – four is the officially supported maximum; beyond that EXOR warn that performance tanks considerably
• set server_pause_game_when_empty "1" – pauses the simulation once the last player disconnects, so your base is not overrun while you are away
• set server_broadcast_enabled "1" – lists the server in the in-game server browser; 0 keeps it private
• set server_password and set server_rcon_password – join password and remote-control password
• set mission_save "SAVE_NAME" – loads an existing save instead of generating a new world

Online co-op arrived on 25 August 2025 with the free Update 2.0 "Co-Op & Endgame" – after more than a year of closed and open beta. Up to four players run the Story Campaign, Survival and the prologue mission together, with difficulty scaling dynamically to the group size. The update also added a real endgame: six megastructures that swallow enormous amounts of resources and require ongoing maintenance, 14 special encounter tiles, a randomised mission generator and up to 15 outposts per save.

On 5 March 2026 came World Expansion IV, free as well: the new Open Campaign lets you pick your starting biome freely, drops dialogue and story locks and gives you a single objective – get the Prime Rift Station running. Alongside it arrived the Cryo Fields, a permanently frozen biome with large palladium deposits and natural supercoolant sources, three new defensive towers (Icicle, Inferno and Shredder, each in three tiers) and much larger solid materials and energy storage buildings. The Open Campaign is co-op ready – so it works on your server from minute one.

EXOR released the dedicated server app itself on 11 December 2025, added a sample configuration in March 2026 and published an official setup guide in April 2026. One pitfall remains the most common source of connection failures: the server and game versions must be identical. On a RespawnHost server a restart handles that – our system checks for new versions on start and installs them.