Hell yeah, multiplayer! This might finally get Stonehearth off my backburner again. Good to see it’s almost here.
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No plans for dedicated server support; that requires a whole extra team to make sure it’s up and running all the time. 
However, if you want to set it up yourself, just leave it paused whenever you’re the last person to leave play, and I guess, make sure the host hearthlings have lots of food… or don’t worry about it and let the host town die for the extra mysterious Roanoke style experience!
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Would it be at all possible to have a Stonehearth executable that only runs the “server” part of the game, without any of the rendering or whatnot? That way people could set up their own long-running servers, if need be.
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@sdee -
So a few thoughts.
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Personal request, so I apologize ahead of time, and I won’t be offended if you say no.
Being you suggested people use a therd party chat like Discord, is there any chance the Official Unofficial Discord could become a little more…official? I understand many people will have their own Discord servers for their groups, but for the people that don’t have a group yet, it’d be a good place to start. Plus we’ve already got a good bit of regulars from the Discourse on. -
This was discussed with @Sweet slightly on Discord, but as @Albert shared the floating box code, with Multiplayer coming, could y’all share the explorable maps mod from your tests? By itself, the current multiplayer is rather cut and dry, basically just being multiple people playing single player together. Allowing some of the more advanced modders a place to start in turning Multiplayer into what a lot of us would like, I think would go a long way.
Beat me to it. If we could get a server only Stonehearth, then I’m sure we could find a way to run it on Linux through some kind of bashing (whether that be with a hammer or code). Something like 90% of dedicated servers are Linux because of how well they run on minimal resources. As for the Steam part of it, Steam has already taken care of that with a Linux Server version.
On that thought as well, the Server Only version could have A LOT of stuff stripped out of it, such as path finding, AI, and like 70% of other things. Unless I’m wrong, even on Windows, this would run like water.
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For dedicated servers, there’s some confusion that might need to be cleared up. We, Team Stonehearth, won’t be able to reliably maintain dedicated servers for people to use.
However, we have a prototype of Stonehearth running in server-only mode on LAN, and we’re looking into whether it’s reasonable to support this on Steam eventually. We’ll try to open it up for people to use, but it may not be as useful as you expect. The majority of heavy lifting is done by the server, and we only use one CPU for the server (with some small exceptions), and another for the client, so whether you also have a local client in the same process does not make a huge difference.
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I think the use case here is that you could have 3 people and 4 computers, such that nobody’s separate machine lags, and people can play on rigs that don’t have 32 gigs of RAM. Wouldn’t the clients see an improvement in speed, if the server process is off-shored to a diff. computer? Either way, I’m very happy to hear this is theoretically possible.
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I apologize if I confused y’all. When I asked for a dedicated server, I’m not asking y’all to host it. I was referring to what you’ve talked about here with a Server Only mode. I’m more than happy to host a game on my personal server for my friends and I (that don’t own the game) to play on.
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I’m glad you guys have a good community going on discord! If it’s working for you keep on going; we tend not to make community-created spaces official because it implies we’ll be checking them, and we only have so much bandwidth.
It’s not a mod but a separate, un-maintained branch of our codebase, and it’s not updated to work with any recent build, so there’s no way to distribute it in an easily digestible way. (Albert wrote his floating physics stuff with modding in mind, so that was easier.) That said, we could see about circulating some of the code, but only after we get through a small mountain of features and all the bugs pouring in from all sides. 
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There is a problem to play with friends you need to have friends.
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so how do you get this password protected unstable branch?
The multiplayer one does not exist yet, the instructions for rickety_building are here NEW BUILDER VERY UNSTABLE BRANCH O.o
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Agreed. Look for Minecraft’s dedicated servers and its popularity.
I have a VPS on which I would be happy to run Stonehearth’s Server
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For Discord you only host it and put a link somewhere. You can ofc. role someone to mod it. Theres barely anyone needed or even payed for that.
Team Radiant has done a great job, but sometimes ignores the best gamedev’s practices.
Don’t take it personally, it’s just an observation. 
For “Official Unofficial Discord” Team Stonehearth just can say that it is now is Official and put a link to in on website. Also the server
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multiplayer means nothing to me… i have no friends that play stonehearth 
This was what were talking about, right. How does a computer who runs less than the whole game need constant developer input? (It was what I was talking about, at least: a non-hacky way to have the host have no hearthlings,town, and rendered world to optimise the hosting performance.)
Ok, it was alreaady cleared up by @max99x, I posted postmaturely.
No point posting here any more
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I mean, no…
For something like a discord server to be considered official, a Radiant team member absolutely has to keep an eye on it. What if people are sharing illegal material on there? How about cracked copies of Stonehearth? Someone does need to check in every now and then to make sure people are behaving.
Team Stonehearth has around 15 members, from what I last recall. Of these, @sdee usually does community engagement, but from the looks of it, she also does some amount of development, either code or content. So now if you took her and made her look after the Discord server, that’s one less person who can spend time on cranking the next alpha out. Now, if this very forum was unofficial, I’d consider your request a fair one. But they’ve already got this official, moderated forum, so like… why bother with another channel?
Disclaimer: I don’t use chatting apps, including discord, so I may be biased.
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To be fair, @Sweet does stop by about once a week. That said though, it is 100% community driven, so you make a fare point, even though the Admins have stated they prohibit pirating and the such. This Discourse is the best place so far to communicate and talk to others, and a lot of the times, people on the Discord will even say that. On the flip side, it’s a good place to chit chat, shoot the crap (so to say), or get quick help for something you’re having problems with, whether that be modding or troubleshooting.
To clear the chance of confusion, I wasn’t asking @sdee or even Team Stonehearth to look after it, I was more asking if we could get their endorsement. If we could, and they made an official post about it (specifically on steam), I feel we could use it as a medium to bridge the communities together (Discourse and Steam), especially with Multiplayer on the horizon.
Sercombe to the dark side. We have cookies.
Seriously though, if you ever just want to bullshit around, come join the lot. It’s not the most active but it’s not dead either.
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