Hosting A Cave Server, Seperate from Surface

[SpiegelZinker]

Hello dear community,

I was wondering wether it was possible to have a seperate cave server. What do I mean by this? I rented a server on a game hosting website for DST, not realizing that caves require their own server. Now, I could pay for a 2nd server, but I wondered wether instead it was possible to host the caves myself. I know that that kind of defeats the entire purpose of a deticated server, but... Just in theory: Is it possible?

Thank you for reading.

[Captain_Rage]

A dedicated server has its world / shard settings dictated by its configuration files. It used to be possible to create a world with only a cave shard, if not mistaken.

[I Heart Popcorn]

I think this may be possible.  Look at the instructions for the cluster.ini file - bind ip section.

 

 

[fall211]

It's probably easiest to ask for a refund and find a different host. Most hosts let you host both surface and caves with just a single subscription. 

[Daniel86268]

It is possible, as I Heart Popcorn suspected.
By Default the server just uses the local IP Adress of the server, cause most people just run it on the same machine. You can however specify a different IP Adress there, so the Servers connect to eachother over the internet, as they are standalone servers after all.
Some things to consider:
1. If you host it on your local machine, your local machine has to be running for the caves to be accessible. If you shut down your system, the caves shut down as well. If a player was in the caves, they can't log into the server till you reconnect the caves again. (At this point, might as well run both servers on your local machine, right?)
2. The handover (going from overworld to caves and vice versa) might be slower than on a local machine, since all the Player data has to be transfered over the internet.
3. The configuration has to be identical, most importantly the master_key, _IP and _port.
4. The Firewalls (on both servers) have to allow the connectivity ports between the servers. If your hoster has the ports blocked, you are probably out of luck already.