A South African community Valheim server. Low ping, 20 slots, a world worth building in. Grab your axe and join the raid.
Checking…Crossplay is switched off on purpose. It caps the server at 10 players and adds lag, so to give everyone 20 low ping slots we run Steam only. Xbox and Game Pass players cannot join for now. Join from the PC (Steam) version using the address on the Join page.
More details on the 20 player setupSteam only, no mods needed. You'll be raiding in under a minute.
Start Game, pick your character, then Join Game → Join IP.
Server: valheim.zhoxie.co.za:2456
Steam only, no mods needed.
Ask Roxy for the current password (shared in stream chat and Discord).
Crossplay is off so we can run 20 slots at low ping (crossplay limits the server to 10 and adds lag). Join from the PC Steam version. Xbox and Game Pass are not supported for now.
More details on the 20 player setup—
Keep it fun for everyone and your builds stay safe.
What is planned and in progress for the server.
Zhoxie's Mead Hall · South Africa hosted Valheim server ·
The full technical picture of what a 20 slot Valheim server can and cannot do, and why we made the choices we did.
Valheim's dedicated server simulates the entire world on a single Unity thread. Extra CPU cores do not speed the simulation up, they only help background jobs. Our host is a Xeon E5-1620 v4 at 3.5 to 3.8 GHz, which is fast per core, but everything the world does still has to fit inside one core's time budget every tick.
Every dropped item, tamed animal, portal, torch and build piece is a networked object the game calls a ZDO. The server has to update and sync all the active ones each tick. Twenty players spread across the map is light work. Twenty players standing in one giant base with thousands of build pieces is what pushes the single thread to 100 percent and causes rubber-banding (you walk, then snap back).
Crossplay routes Xbox and Game Pass players through a PlayFab relay. That relay is hard capped at 10 players and adds a hop of latency plus extra CPU on every packet. You cannot have both crossplay and 20 low ping slots, so we chose 20 slots. Steam players connect directly by IP, which is why it is Steam PC only.
On this hardware, 16 to 20 concurrent players stays smooth in normal play. Past that, the single thread starts missing its tick deadline during big group fights and in dense bases, and everyone feels it at once as lag and rubber-banding. Twenty is the sweet spot where the server stays responsive even on a busy night. The vanilla game caps concurrent players at 10, so getting to 20 already needs a server side mod.
We load the BepInEx mod framework plus a MaxPlayerCount mod on the server. Both are server side only, you join with the normal unmodded Steam game and need no downloads. The vanilla launcher is kept as a fallback, so if a Valheim patch ever breaks the mods the server can still run unmodded at 10 players until they update.
At a full 20 players the server pushes roughly 30 to 40 Mbps outbound, which the datacenter uplink handles easily. Memory is capped at 14 GB and the world autosaves every 30 minutes, with separate daily backups kept for 30 days so griefing or a crash can always be rolled back.
Play the PC Steam version, spread big builds out rather than piling everything into one mega base, and the server will hold a smooth 20. If you ever feel rubber-banding, it is almost always many players plus a dense area at the same moment, not the player count on its own.