Valheim server RAM: how much do you need?

What uses the memory in Valheim

Zones stay resident on the server once someone has explored them, so memory follows the ground you have covered, not the size of your group. A world that has been running for months and sailed in every direction needs a lot more than a new world with exactly the same players.

Valheim server RAM by player count

The calculator above, run for 3 common sizes. Each figure is rounded up to a plan size people actually sell.

Where people get it wrong

Leaving mods out of the sum. BepInEx and a Valheim Plus-style setup cost a fixed amount on top of the base figure however small the world is, and they cost it at startup — which is how a server that ran fine without mods can fail to boot once they are added.

Disk space: the world and its backups

A Valheim world is two files kept side by side: a small .fwl holding the name and seed, and a .db holding everything anyone has explored or built. The .db grows with the same thing that drives memory, so a long-running world gets bigger on disk as well as in RAM.

The server also keeps its own rolling backups, four by default (-backups). Each is a copy of the world, so budget disk for the world several times over, not once. If disk is tight, lower -backups rather than turning backups off; a corrupted save with no copy is the one failure you cannot fix later.

When saves start to hurt

The server writes the whole world to disk on a timer, every 1800 seconds unless -saveinterval says otherwise. On a small world that is invisible. On one that has been played for months it takes long enough to notice, and the cure is fast storage rather than more memory: an SSD makes far more difference to save time than any amount of extra RAM.