Which games get better trough selfhosting a game server?

For sure Minecraft Modpacks. Can set up factories for stuff you need and leave it running.

Terraria

That's what I played, they already have been mentioned.

Would have loved it to have a Arma 2 Dayz Mod Server when it was on its peak. Get myself enough loot and raid other ppl on the official servers. But there were enough unprotected "hack" servers where you just could hack in your loot without getting banned. Oh Yea was a fun time. No, I never teleported ppl or nuked a whole server. I just got myself back what other hackers destroyed.

Just like Satisfactory: Farming Simulator xD With a dedicated server you can choose to keep the sim running while no players are logged in.

It only sucks that they dont offer the server software as a standalone independent free software. Instead you need to buy another copy of the game to run the server with, and im pretty sure if you want to use DLCs, you need to buy those for the server too. Mods of course exist and make some of the paid DLC less interesting. Still not a great practice. Other games only require the host to own DLC and each connecting player can make use of them, while playing on that server. Imo this leads to making a game much more interesting to a small group of friends.

I like to make my Project Zomboid server, which I set up to my liking.

I use https://linuxgsm.com/ if possible, which makes setting up a server really easy.

Assetto corsa with mods

OpenTTD - the transport tycoon game

Conan Exiles, 7 Days to Die, Space Engineers, Memories of Mars, Ark, V Rising.

I host quite a few servers for our gaming community and mostly it just keeps griefers out and allows people to request mods if they want them. More options for more people to have more fun

Valheim for sure. My friend and I tried two "Valheim hosts" and it was a nightmare to manage. 15 minutes later, our own server was up and running including V+ and we've had no issues since.

Good question; Game servers are one aspect of self-hosting I haven't explored yet. Just wondering: How heavy is this? I assume it mostly needs a lot of RAM?

Probably not quite what you mean but Foundry VTT makes playing Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder online much better. Most competitors are cloud hosted and all but the basic features are locked behind a subscription whereas Foundry is an application you buy outright. The catch is that it still needs hosting somewhere so those with any technical wherewithal either host it in Oracle's Cloud since "always free" tier VMs are ample to run it or else self-host on a Raspberry Pi or similar. Those who don't self-host have no other recourse except to pay a housing service like Forge a monthly subscription for a limited amount of disk space

Rust

Edit:

Check out AMP by cubecoders for an easy to deploy all-in-one game server hosting web interface.

I love it. It supports many of the games mentioned in the thread already.

How beefy does the server need to be for Satisfactory?

Don't want to hijack this post, but I'm very interested in setting up my own game servers, but interested in how you all do it - pterodactyl? MineOS? what options are available?

Terraria and Valheim are two I ran with a lot of success

I run a slew of game servers on a proxmox node. What gets used most often are Minecraft servers and Factorio servers.

I suck at anything except Windows and have a machine that I use for hosting 2-3 DayZ servers for friends in addition to Plex. I use Omega Manager for it and it uses a separate Steam account that I own the game on. It manages the mods from Steam workshop too, which is great.

Other good games are 7 days 2 Die, Space Engineers, Minecraft, Valheim, Ark and Connan Exiles. All are great if you want something for your friends or want to host a bigger community.

I've messed with CubeCoders AMP a little bit for Minecraft and 7 Days and it worked. There is also WindowsGSM and Pterodactyl which i think is for Linux and Windows.

Happy gaming!

I would say every game that you can selfhost gets better somehow.

Currently, I host several 7D2D servers. I utilize CubeCoder's AMP (Application Management Panel), which has been effective. Through AMP, I've connected a primary server and multiple secondary servers from various server centers. The advantage of self-hosting is that you gain full control over settings and can incorporate mods. This flexibility is particularly valuable for all the 7D2D servers I manage, as players often request different mods to be enabled.

Not really answering your question here but you said it is fun to play Satisfactory on a server. For me it's unplayable: permanent game crashes, permanent server timeouts (I have decent hardware on the server) and so on. But oh well I'm on update 8 maybe that's the problem...

Terraria, using Tshock.

Quake 1, quake 3 promode CPMA, Warsow, TeeWorlds, ET...

seriously, any fast paced shooter. There used to be so many great games that benefited from low pings. That <10ms expierience is amazing, especially when everyone has it. Lag compensation was not really a thing (and to be honest nowadays it is everywhere and seriously sucks). You could easily tell which players were playing locally and which connected from the internet by just looking at the score - it gave a serious advantage. Nowadays everything is on it's head with "peakers advantage".

It used to be THE WAY of playing those games 20 years ago and it was a norm to have 100-200 FPS and a ping of 2-5ms. You just turned of almost anything graphically to get the FPS (I usually left *some* remainings of textures as it became confusing otherwise) and you self hosted a game server so that all your friends can play with low pings.

You usually set up a TeamSpeak server along for chat and voice, most likely something like Mumble nowadays, instead.