Guide to hosting & creating your own PixARK server (Windows and Linux)

Note: This guide is for creating your own, locally hosted server. If you simply want to run your own server, we offer high quality, one click PixARK server hosting within NodePanel. Check out our pricing page for more information.

Introduction

PixARK is a game based on the Unreal engine. Whilst this engine does offer support for both Windows and Linux, and the developers do provide hosting software, at the time of writing, they only supports Windows.

For further configuration options than the ones discussed below, please see the related article linked at the bottom of this page.

Windows

Starting up a PixARK server on Windows is fairly trivial. You'll just need a basic understanding of SteamCMD, which you find more information about here.

1. Download the files using SteamCMD. For this example, we're going to assume the files are being downloaded to C:/PixARK.

steamcmd +login anonymous +force_install_dir C:/PixARK +app_update 824360 validate Note: A lot of guides online are using ID 593600. We've found a lot more success using 824360. 2. Once the files are downloaded, create a simple start.bat file containing the following:

start "" /NORMAL C:\PixArk\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64\PixARKServer.exe "CubeWorld_Light?listen?MaxPlayers={MAXPLAYERS}?SessionName={SERVERNAME}?Port=27015?QueryPort=27016?RCONPort=27017?ServerPassword={SERVERPASSWORD}?ServerAdminPassword={YOURADMINPASSWORD}?CULTUREFORCOOKING=en" -NoBattlEye -CubePort=15000 -cubeworld=world -nosteamclient -NoHangDetection -game -server -log

Be sure to replace the {MAXPLAYERS} variable with your desired players, the {SERVERNAME} variable with your desired server name, the {SERVERPASSWORD} variable with your desired server password, and the {YOURADMINPASSWORD} with your admin password.

1. Double click this .bat file to start the server. It can take some time for the server to initialise, so be prepared to wait about 5-10 minutes on the first boot.

2. If you're running this on a restricted network, or home PC, you will likely need to open ports on your router to allow players to join. Please see your router's manufacturer guide for instructions on how to do this. This can be a complicated process, which is one of the reasons we offer a one-click solution for creating PixARK servers within our control panel. Read more information here.

Linux

As previously mentioned, there aren't currently any native files available to run PixARK on Linux. Using Wine though, we can run a compatibility layer on Linux capable of running Windows applications. This does of course come at a performance cost, and unpredictable instabilities, however for many Sysadmins, running servers on Linux is the preferred choice.

1. Install Wine 3.4. This can vary between different distributions and flavours of Linux, so we recommend following the guides here. Wine doesn't like running as root, so be sure to switch to another user before following any further steps. We're going to use user steam.

2. Download the files using SteamCMD. For this example, we're going to assume the files are being downloaded to /home/pixark. You may need to install SteamCMD for Linux first, there is a guide on that here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Linux

steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +login anonymous +force_install_dir /home/pixark +app_update 824360 validate

1. As the steam user, run the following commands:

• export WINEARCH='win64' - this will set the Wine architecture to 64bit.

• wine wineboot --init- this will initialise Wine. It will likely throw warnings about $DISPLAY being undefined. As we're running a console application without any GUI, this can safely be ignored.

1. Run the following command to start the server:

wine64 /home/pixark/ShooterGame/Binaries/Win64/PixARKServer.exe "CubeWorld_Light?listen?MaxPlayers={MAXPLAYERS}?SessionName={SERVERNAME}?Port=27015?QueryPort=27016?RCONPort=27017?ServerPassword={SERVERPASSWORD}?CULTUREFORCOOKING=en" -NoBattlEye -CubePort=15000 -cubeworld=world -nosteamclient -NoHangDetection -game -server -log

Be sure to replace the {MAXPLAYERS} variable with your desired players, the {SERVERNAME} variable with your desired server name, the {SERVERPASSWORD} variable with your desired server password, and the {YOURADMINPASSWORD} with your admin password.

For easy deployment and setup of your own PixARK server, we recommend our PixARK Server Hosting.