🌲 Dockerized Sons of the Forest Server on Linux 🌲

Host your own Sons of the Forest dedicated server on Linux. Easily deploy with Docker 🐳.

🛖 Description

With this repo, you can host your own Sons of the Forest dedicated server on a linux machine. It uses Wine 🍷, because the game server is written for Windows, and the xserver-xorg-video-dummy driver so that it can run headless (without display, mouse, or keyboard). The whole thing is packaged in a Docker image so it's easy to deploy.

🪓 Prerequisites

1. Set up a Linux machine. I recommend a t3.xlarge EC2 instance on AWS, running Amazon Linux.
2. Install Docker Engine.
3. Enable Docker Engine to start on sign in. For example

sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl start docker

4. Install Docker Compose.
5. Optionally add yourself to the docker user group so you can use Docker commands without sudo. You will have to log out and back in for the change to take effect.

🏹 Installation

• git clone the repo onto your Linux machine and cd into it. The first time you start the server, it will download the Docker image. If you want to build the image yourself, see the configuration section below.

🛠️ Configuration

1. Create a new directory in the repo's root directory called userdata. This folder will remain even if you remove the container and it holds the saved game data.
2. In userdata, create two files called dedicatedserver.cfg and ownerswhitelist.txt. Write configuration data into these files according to the example files provided in this repo, and the configuration guide. At a minimum, you should set the server name and password. As mentioned in the troubleshooting section below, you may want to shorten the interval between autosaves to avoid losing progress.
3. You may want to build your own image to get the latest game updates. In that case open docker-compose.yml, comment out the first image element and uncomment the second image element.

🧟 Usage

Starting the game server

Run docker compose up or docker compose up -d in the repo root directory. This will start the container using the configuration in the docker-compose.yml file. The container is configured to start automatically when the computer boots up.

Stopping the game server

If your shell is attached to the docker container, use the CTRL+C keyboard interrupt to gracefully stop the server. If the container is running in the background, run docker compose stop instead. You can also just gracefully shutdown your computer to stop the server. Docker will receive a shutdown signal and it will pass it to the Docker container.

Updating the game server

If you are pulling a new image from Docker Hub...

docker compose down
git pull origin main
docker pull chemineer/sons-of-the-forest:latest
docker compose up

If you are building the image yourself...

docker compose down
git pull origin main
docker build --no-cache -t chemineer/sons-of-the-forest .
docker compose up

🩸 Troubleshooting

Ports

Make sure you open ports 8766, 27016, and 9700. Also your router must be configured to forward the ports.

Wine Assertion Error

You might occassionally see the following error in the console when starting the server

wineserver: server/fd.c:1622: set_fd_events: Assertion 'poll_users[user] == fd' failed.

If this occurs, simply docker compose stop or docker compose down and then bring it back up. It does not seem to happen twice in a row.

Lost progress in game

Any structures you make in the game since the last autosave will be lost if the server shuts down before the next autosave. In the dedicatedserver.cfg file, change SaveInterval to 120, or some other relatively short time, so you don't have to wait long for the next save.