How much RAM does your Enshrouded server need?

Start at 8 GB. 4 GB is a real floor, not a decorative one. If you want the short answer, that is it. The longer answer is worth reading, because Enshrouded's two official memory figures look like they contradict each other, and because we can tell you what our own servers actually use — which, as far as we can tell, nobody else publishes.

Keen's two numbers, and why both are right

If you go looking, you will find two very different figures from Keen Games, and it is easy to come away confused:

Keen's recommended server specifications page says 16 GB of RAM — for a 4–6 player server and for a 16 player server.
Keen's dedicated server FAQ says the server process uses “~4.4GB of physical RAM” in idle, that “each player needs up to 100MB” more, and that in total “the server should not use more than 6GB”.

Both are Keen's own words and neither is wrong. They are measuring different things. The 16 GB page is describing a whole machine — it lists CPU models, 30 GB of free SSD space and per-player upload capacity alongside the memory figure. That is the spec of a physical box you would buy to self-host on, operating system and all. The FAQ figures describe the server process itself, which is the thing your hosted service is actually running.

So when you are renting a server, the FAQ numbers are the relevant ones. You are not buying a machine. You are buying memory for a process.

What our servers actually use

We can go one better than quoting a FAQ, because we can read the meters. On 30 August 2026 we took a memory reading from every running Enshrouded server on our infrastructure — all five of them, across three nodes in the UK and Germany, at 0 or 1 players connected:

Slots sold	Players connected	Memory in use
16	0	669 MB
6	0	1.06 GB
4	0	780 MB
16	1	970 MB
16	0	732 MB

Roughly 0.7 to 1.1 GB, near idle. That is a long way under Keen's ~4.4 GB idle figure — which is a useful thing to know before you talk yourself into buying 16 GB.

Two honest caveats, because a number without its conditions is not much use. These were near-idle snapshots, so a server mid-session with a full group loaded in will read higher. And we do not know how old or how heavily built each of those worlds is, which — as the next section explains — is the thing that actually moves the figure.

The surprise in that table: slots are not the driver

Look again at which server used the most memory. It was not one of the 16-slot servers. It was the 6-slot one, at 1.06 GB — more than a 16-slot server sitting on the same kind of node.

That is not a fluke, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Enshrouded's memory use tracks how much world there is, not how many seats you bought. A world accumulates:

Built structures. Every block placed in a base is a tracked object, and Enshrouded encourages large, dense building.
Terrain changes. Enshrouded lets you dig and reshape the ground almost anywhere, and every change has to be remembered as a difference from the terrain the game generated.
Everything left lying around. Chests, crafting stations, placed items, cleared areas — all persistent.

A six-month-old world with three dedicated builders in it will want more memory than a fresh world with sixteen people running around in it. Keen's save-size figures point the same way: a world file starts small and can reach around 100 MB once it has been heavily built.

This is also why we sell player slots and RAM as two separate choices rather than bundling them. They answer two different questions. Slots decide how many people can be on at once. RAM decides how much world you can accumulate before things get tight. A small group building an enormous castle needs the second one, not the first.

So why is 4 GB the floor?

Because the arithmetic holds, even pessimistically. Take the highest idle reading we measured, 1.06 GB, and add Keen's own per-player allowance of up to 100 MB for a completely full sixteen-player server. That comes to roughly 2.7 GB — comfortably inside 4 GB, with headroom left for the world to keep growing.

4 GB is a genuine working configuration for a small group on a young world, and we list it because some people want exactly that and should not be upsold out of it.

So why do we recommend 8 GB?

Because 4 GB is sized for the world you have today, and 8 GB is sized for the world you will have in six months. It sits above Keen's stated 6 GB ceiling for the process, which means even the pessimistic reading of Keen's own documentation fits inside it with room to spare. For most groups who intend their world to last, it is the setting that means never thinking about this page again.

How to tell when you have outgrown it

You do not have to guess in advance. These are the signals worth acting on:

The server restarts on its own after running for a while. A server that is fine for an hour and then drops is a much stronger memory signal than one that never starts at all.
Stutter that arrives when the group spreads out across separate bases and is not there when everyone is in one place.
It has got worse over time on the same world, with the same group and nothing else changed. That is the world growing into its ceiling.
The periodic world save starts causing a visible hitch. Enshrouded writes the world every few minutes; when that write becomes noticeable, the world is large.

What is not a memory problem: one player lagging while everybody else is fine (that is their connection), or a slow load when you first join (that is normal on a big world).

Changing it later

RAM is not a decision you are locked into. Your world lives on the server, in the server's own save folder — it is not tied to the memory allocation — so you can move your service up or down from your account as the world grows. There is no reason to over-buy at the start “just in case”. Start at the recommended figure and let the world tell you when it wants more.

What we are not going to give you

A table of exact megabytes per player. An honest one does not exist. Two sixteen-player Enshrouded worlds can sit a long way apart depending on how much has been built in them, and any precise number we printed would be wrong for somebody. What we can give you is the shape of the problem, the two official figures explained, and real readings from our own fleet — which is more than a specification would have told you anyway.

If you are not sure what your world needs, open a ticket and we will look at your service with you.