Dedicated servers/Running as a Service

This page describes how to set up a dedicated server as a service.

Running as a Service
Running the dedicated server as a Service allows your server to auto-restart in the event of a crash, as well as automatically start after booting. How this is handled differs between Linux and Windows operating systems, so make sure you use the correct section for your environment.

Systemd
Systemd is the service management system installed for many Linux distributions.

Ensure SteamCMD is installed. Once done, some small preparations for Systemd must be made defining the service and configuring it. The following systemd unit file for the Satisfactory service will automatically use SteamCMD to check for updates any time the server is started or restarted. It will also start the server when the host is rebooted. Edit the user and path to reflect the location and owner of the Satisfactory installation. The unit file should be placed at

The above configuration will have the server logs written to the system Journal. If you do not wish for this to happen, and would rather have log and error messages sent to files on disk, you can add the following two directives to the [Service] section of the Unit file. Bear in mind that if you do so, the log files will grow without limit if you do not also set up a log rotation scheme such as configuring  to archive and rotate logs for you. That configuration is beyond the scope of this article. With that in mind, to log to disk rather than the journal, add these directives: After creating the service, you will need to execute a daemon-reload to load the new service into systemd: To enable and start the service, use the following two commands respectively: You can check the status with. If configured correctly the output should look something like:

If the service times out before its loaded it will continue in a loop. This can happpen if you are testing on older hardware that doesn't reach the minimum requirements for the server hardware. To prevent this you can add the following line to the [Service] section: TimeoutSec=XXX. You replace the XXX with a numerical value in seconds. Normally a service times out after 90 seconds on most distros.

Experimental Branch
To have  pre-fetch the Experimental branch of the Dedicated Server upon restart, adjust the   directive to tell SteamCMD to use the   branch, as follows (truncated for brevity):

OpenRC
OpenRC is a service management system for Gentoo Linux.

Install SteamCMD using Portage, and accept it's license. Its installation directory by default is.

The recommended way to get it set up is to link to the already existing SteamCMD init file with  and then copying the default config from   to.

The completed  would look something like this:

NSSM
You can use Non-Sucking Service Manager to easily set up auto-restart for the dedicated server.

Once you've downloaded and installed NSSM, navigate to the directory containing nssm.exe and run the below command: This will pull up a GUI for configuration. Set the "Path" to the location of FactoryServer.exe, Set the "Arguments" to "-unattended". You can modify other settings if you want, but that's the only required step. Click "install", then run this command. Other useful  commands:

Docker
Docker is a cross-platform utility designed to run services in virtual machines in a compartmentalized fashion. This is an example  you can use to run the Satisfactory dedicated server inside a docker container The   is declared as a volume so that the savegames and the config of the server can be accessed and modified from outside the container. If that is not mapped to a host directory as done with -v, it will go into. You can find exactly where using docker inspect on the running container. More information here.

Docker-Compose
Use the following example docker-compose file in parallel with the Dockerfile and run  for a detached background server.