How powerful of a server will starbound require?

I wouldn't expect any of that from a open beta release or the actual release sadly, I would love to be proven wrong though. However what is important is that the devs said specifically that the game would, if not right away then eventually, be made to allow for modding. And knowing how powerful the community is at modding that will allow of an unlimited range of possibilities in the future of this game.

The devs have already took into consideration player created content with the ability that allows a GM, server admin, to can take control of story NPC in order to better simulate an event or story scene.

 

Yup, this game is going to be as moddable as minecraft, and then some more! Everything is modular and nice.
It's going to turn into a massive sandbox with tons of community mods spicing it up.

 

Minecraft is not very moddable, even with the efforts of forge
In any case, the server is supposedly very resource cheap though you'll obviously need more scaling with players and probably mods.

 

Well in my experience building game servers, what I would recommend for a starbound server is a virtual server with 8 processing cores, at least 1GB RAM (2~4GB is preferred) and 50GB storage tops, I have a similar build for a minecraft server that has tons of mods and worlds, it doesn't lag much, the most important part though is your network connection, even tough you may have a good connection at home, it is not as good as a data center connection (and if it is well that means you probably have cisco switches and fiber optics plus appliance firewalls at home which is unlikely).

So check virtual or dedicated server deals on the web, beware of virtual servers that are oversold tho cause those will be a pain in the ass for you in the future.

A virtual server with the configuration mentioned above costs about 20~30 USD monthly and a dedicated server with a overall superior configuration (because no one sells a dedicated server with 8 processing cores and only 1G should cost about 70USD monthly plus a setup fee that ranges from 50~100USD.

As many mentioned this game is not resource intensive, so a high transfer rate from your hard drives to your clients is the point that you should try to improve if you still insist on a home hosted server so set up a raid 0 or raid 10 (if you need retundancy) and make sure that there are no resource hogs on your network such as hubs and that kind of inexpensive crap that usually turns your network in to packet nightmare.

 

Tiyuri did a livestream while hosting a server at one point. On his "1 mbps upload," the server appeared to function perfectly for players playing around the world (The dev team isn't united, if you didn't know). There was only lag when Tiyuri broke open an absolute TON of water while the other two on the server PVP'd and they didn't even teleport around that much! Largest deviation I saw was about one block.
So yeah. Your upload is definitely not an issue.

But here's the part you're interested in!
The world format of Starbound is simple: Save changes, not the world itself. It regenerates the world every time you go to it, keeping the changes.
...hm. I'm not sure if it's more resource intensive to load the whole world every time or regenerate it every time. But that probably is going to be one of your most intensive functions.

 

Or you can just.. host from your PC.
If your PC can handle the game just fine, it'll most likely handle the server just fine, if your internet is fast enough.
So far hosting games on my own PC has always given people a low ping.

 

Well mods keep games alive for a lot longer, so Starbound probably needs it.

 

What I meant was a server with a hefty amount of mods will likely be more resource intensive than one without.

 

Why would you even compare Starbound to Minecraft in terms of network stress? The two are completely different in that regard.

 

We need to know what things are going to be performed client side; I'm guessing it will only perform the essentials such as movement, since doing things in the client opens a window for cheats. The Minecraft world is 'infinite', but only the closest chunks to the player get processed, so I guess Starbound server is similar to Minecraft server in that way, also remember that C++ is faster than Java. I think that 2GB of RAM and a decent CPU will be enough.

 

Maps can become quite large in file size, however.

 

Again, no real bearing on server performance.

 

It's probably okay to say you're safe if you can already run a similar type of server for Terraria. The requirements for a Starbound server will most likely be higher than Terraria's, but not by a large amount. The only time I could see a Starbound server being *considerably* more taxing than a Terraria server is when a Starbound server generates new worlds that players discover. I could be absolutely wrong though - no official requirements/recommendations have been released regarding servers.

 

There is no definitive answer as server kechanics arent fully worked out according to the road map how ever im thinking if you can run terraria you will probably be okay as starbound is supposed to be more efficient

More info as it develops