Pay-as-you-play dedicated hosting for any Steam game with A2S support.

Discord-controlled. Spins up on demand in about a minute, auto-shuts down when nobody's playing, and persists your world saves across sessions.

Built for groups who play a few hours a week and don't want a flat £10–20 per month hosting bill for a server that sits idle 95% of the time.

Not a business pitch — there's no SaaS, no paid tier, no signup. It's open source (MIT) for anyone who wants cheap dedicated hosting for the games they play with their friends.

Supported games

Want another A2S-compatible Steam game (Project Zomboid, 7 Days to Die, Don't Starve Together, Core Keeper, CS2 / Source-engine games)? A new folder under games/ with a compose file and an .env.example is usually all it takes. See games/valheim/ for the template.

Non-A2S games (Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory) need a per-game player-detection probe rather than the default A2S one. The extension point exists (games/<name>/probe.sh); see games/palworld/probe.sh for a worked example. PRs to add any of these welcome.

How it works

• Cloudflare Worker handles start | stop | status Discord slash commands. On start, it creates a Hetzner VM from a prepared snapshot and edits the Discord message live as the server provisions and boots.
• Snapshot contains the OS, Docker, the game install (4–10 GB depending on game) and any per-game patches, so the VM is fully ready in ~75 seconds without re-downloading via Steam each time.
• Watchdog queries the game's Steam A2S protocol every minute. While anyone's connected, the idle timer is held at zero. After 60 minutes of zero players, the watchdog calls back to the Worker, which deletes the VM.
• Persistent block volume is attached to each VM and holds the world save files. Survives the VM lifecycle so the same world loads every session.

Cost

Compared to flat-rate hosting providers at £10–20/month per game, regardless of use.

Repository layout

games/
  enshrouded/   docker-compose, .env, entrypoint patch, README
  valheim/      docker-compose, .env, README
  palworld/     docker-compose, .env, README
worker/         Cloudflare Worker source — parameterised by GAME_NAME / GAME_PORT
server/         Generic VM-side files: watchdog, systemd units
scripts/
  bake-snapshot.sh GAME=<game> ...
SETUP.md        End-to-end setup walkthrough
docs/
  blog-post.md  Architecture writeup

One Worker deployment per game. Run multiple games by deploying multiple Workers (different name in wrangler.jsonc, different GAME_NAME env var, different snapshot. Hetzner volumes and firewalls can be shared or separated as you prefer).

Quickstart

If you have a Hetzner account, a Cloudflare account, a Discord developer application, and the prerequisites installed, the whole flow is:

# 1. Bootstrap the Hetzner side: SSH key, firewall, saves volume
bash scripts/setup-hetzner.sh enshrouded

# 2. Configure + deploy the Worker (one deploy, snapshot is auto-discovered)
cd worker
cp wrangler.jsonc.example wrangler.jsonc
$EDITOR wrangler.jsonc                # fill in the IDs from step 1
wrangler secret put HETZNER_TOKEN
wrangler secret put WATCHDOG_SECRET   # save a copy — needed in step 4
npm install && wrangler deploy

# 3. Register the /enshrouded slash command (see SETUP.md §3 for the
#    Discord application setup itself)

# 4. Bake the snapshot. Create a temp Hetzner VM with the saves volume
#    attached, SSH in, then one command:
export WORKER_URL=https://<your-worker>.workers.dev/api/cleanup \
       WATCHDOG_SECRET=<from step 2> \
       SERVER_NAME="My Shroud" \
       SERVER_PASSWORD=<your-password>
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jdmcgrath/steam-server-on-demand/main/scripts/bake-bootstrap.sh \
  | bash -s -- enshrouded

# 5. Wait for the steam download, stop the container, take the snapshot
#    (description starts with the game name, e.g. `enshrouded-v1`),
#    delete the bake VM. No second Worker deploy needed — the Worker
#    auto-discovers the latest snapshot by description prefix.

# 6. Sanity-check everything wired up correctly
bash scripts/verify.sh

# 7. /enshrouded start in your Discord

Substitute valheim, palworld, or vrising for enshrouded to set up other games.

Setup

See SETUP.md for the full walkthrough with explanations: Hetzner project bootstrap, Discord application, baking the snapshot, deploying the Worker. Plan ~45 minutes per game, most of which is the one-off Steam download during the bake step.

You'll need:

• A Hetzner Cloud account (per-hour VM billing)
• A Cloudflare account (the Free tier is enough; the 75 s background poll fits inside Free's CPU/request limits since the work is mostly network I/O and setTimeout)
• A Discord application with a bot user per game

Contributing

PRs welcome. The single highest-leverage contribution is adding support for another game — usually one new folder under games/ with two files. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the walkthrough.

Other open issues live on the issues page.

Built on top of

This project is thin orchestration around several substantial open-source Docker images. The people who maintain them did the actually-hard work of packaging dedicated game servers in a way that runs reliably under Wine, Proton, and steamcmd:

• sknnr/enshrouded-dedicated-server — Enshrouded
• lloesche/valheim-server — Valheim
• trueosiris/vrising — V Rising
• thijsvanloef/palworld-server-docker — Palworld

I don't take donations for this repo — it's just a weekend hack I open-sourced because I couldn't find one online. If you'd like to support open-source work this project depends on, those maintainers' repos and GitHub profiles are where the actual value flows. Several of them have Sponsor buttons.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.