Dedicated Servers 1.0 - What to Expect

2025/01/31

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Hello Moria Community! As January comes to a close, the dev team has been busy prepping our next update: the full release of dedicated servers. 

The dedicated server alpha was a big success. We originally planned on giving out 100 keys but there was so much energy we ended up giving out almost a thousand. And the Discord channel #ds-chat became one of the busiest on the server. Thank you to everyone who tested it and sent feedback, crashes and bugs. 

Keep an eye out in February for this update to go live. In the meantime, here is a preview of the biggest changes from the alpha. 

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Advanced Ways to Join

Players will now be able to join servers directly through IP and domain name. There is also a new option that lets players bypass the join code for a server running on the same machine they use to play Return to Moria. 

We’ve also added a server history that will record the most recent successful joins. This should make it even faster to get onto servers you go to the most.

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Cleaned up Kicking & Blocking

The act of kicking and blocking has been cleaned up considerably. Now when a player is kicked via the server console they are not automatically blocked. This should help when you need to kick your friend who has gone afk for too long but don't want to permaban them.

When a player is kicked or blocked the server now uses usernames instead of Dwarf names. And the username is added to the permissions file. It should be easy to copy and paste between sections to change their status. 

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First Version of Player Permissions

Server hosts can now designate permissions for players on the server. Each player can be granted or denied permission to build or ability to take from storage. The file will also show recent players to make it easier to edit their permissions. There are many ways we make this more robust in future updates.

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Performance Improvements

We took a crack at making the dedicated server more efficient. By improving the navigation system used by flying creatures we saved a lot of CPU burden. Along the way, we made flying creatures a bit smarter. Beware of those moths!

We also noticed more load walls and longer loading times on some host machines, no matter how powerful the specs. We’ve added a server setting LoadedAreaLimit that will let those more powerful machines increase the total number of loaded game areas and the amount of drops allowed to persist. This should reduce those server instances of load walls.

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Quality of Life Improvements

Along with the feature updates above we’ve also fixed some of the more commonly requested issues from the community. World names and invite codes can now be changed in the console. Starting a server should no longer choke on apostrophes. Anyone in the game can now delete waypoints on the server. We’ve also made it easier for trusted third parties to rent servers to players. There are many more than this, so keep your eye out for the full patch notes. 

Many of the improvements and fixes above are a direct result of player feedback. Be sure to jump into Discord and keep the feedback coming! We plan on continuing to improve the server with each update.

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