ICARUS Server Hosting

"Added GGHost to the list of verified server providers."

Verified means the developer put us on that list — not that we are the only host on it. Several providers are. What it does tell you is that the studio has looked at how we run their game.

Icarus gives you three ways to play a prospect. Single-player runs on your PC, for you alone. Peer-to-peer lets friends join a session you host, but that session lives inside your game client: when you close Icarus, or your connection drops, everyone is out and the world stops. A dedicated server runs on its own, separate from anybody's game. Nobody has to be the host, nobody's PC has to stay on, and the world is there whenever your group is.

Running that build at home means keeping a machine on around the clock, forwarding ports, applying each weekly update by hand, and accepting that your home connection is now the server's connection. Here, the server exists a few minutes after checkout, updates arrive on their own, and it sits on business connectivity in a datacentre.

What you keep is the control: the settings file, join and admin passwords, prospect selection, RCON, and file access through the GG Host control panel. Passwords are a two-minute job (guide).

This is the part people get wrong about dedicated servers, so it is worth being precise. Your Icarus service does not host one prospect. It stores as many as you create, listed in the server lobby, and you pick which one to run. One is live at a time; the rest are sitting there waiting. Finish a mission, drop back to the lobby, load your open world instead, come back to the outpost next weekend. Nothing is lost when you switch.

The three kinds behave differently and that is the point of keeping several. Missions are the classic Icarus loop — drop, complete the contract, extract, and the prospect ends. Outposts such as ARCWOOD, ICEHOLM and HOLDFAST are permanent bases you keep returning to. Open World prospects on Styx and Olympus have no timer and no extraction pressure, which is the closest Icarus gets to a persistent survival server, and the reason a lot of groups rent one in the first place.

On a peer-to-peer session all of that lives in one player's save folder. Here it lives on the server, so it belongs to the group rather than to whoever happens to be online.

A prospect you started on your own PC can move to your server. Each one is a single .json file in Icarus's local save folder, and copying it into the server's prospects folder is the whole job — it then appears in the lobby alongside everything else, ready to load.

One warning worth repeating, because it comes straight from RocketWerkz: do not rename the file or edit what is inside it. Their documentation is blunt about the consequence — "Changing the File Name, or the json data of your ProspectName.json, will corrupt your saved data. The corrupt data will save into the prospect and become UNRECOVERABLE." Copy it as it is, and it will load as it was.

Attack traffic is handled by our in-house mitigation, written on XDP and eBPF. That means packets are inspected in the network driver, before the operating system's network stack ever sees them — the cheapest possible place to drop something hostile, and the reason filtering does not cost you frames while it is happening.

It is on by default, on every server, at no extra charge. There is no protected tier to upgrade to, because an unprotected one was never worth selling.

Icarus ships on a weekly cadence and has done for years — RocketWerkz are past Week 248 at the time of writing, with the Scoria deep ore veins update landing on September 3, 2026, Slinker saddles the week before and Tusker breeding the week before that. Few survival games move that fast.

For a server owner that is a standing chore, so we take it: your server picks up each build automatically. Your prospects carry across the update, the same as they do locally.

• How to set a join and admin password on your Icarus server