Game server storage: disk space by game

A game server needs enough disk for five things: the installed game, the world and its saves, mods and workshop content, logs and local backups, and roughly 20 to 30 per cent free on top so the next update has room to download. In practice that is 5 to 15 GB for light games such as Terraria, Factorio and Counter-Strike 1.6, 15 to 40 GB for most survival and sandbox games, and 40 to 100 GB for large installs with mods - Arma 3, DayZ with a big mod list, ARK, Counter-Strike 2 with workshop maps. Disk is the resource that fails most quietly: a server runs perfectly at 97% full until the update or save that needs the last few gigabytes, and then it breaks in a way that rarely mentions disk at all.

What fills a game server's disk#

Every game server's disk divides into the same categories. Only the first is what people think about when they buy.

1. The install. The server binaries and game data, downloaded with SteamCMD or the game's own tool. Grows with every major update.
2. The world and saves. Region files, world databases, player data. Grows with play, sometimes steeply.
3. Mods, plugins and workshop content. Often larger than the install on modded servers.
4. Logs and crash dumps. Small per day, large per year if nobody prunes them.
5. Local backups. Every built-in backup rotation writes full copies of the world beside it.
6. Update headroom. Free space for SteamCMD to download changed files before replacing the old ones.

A practical way to size: add the install, the expected world size at the end of its life (or the next wipe), the mods you plan, and the backups you keep locally, then add a quarter on top. The table below has done that sum for common games.

Disk by game#

These are realistic allocations for a normal server with a reasonable mod list, not the size of a fresh download. They leave room for growth and for updates.

Two patterns are worth noticing. The games with the smallest installs are not always the ones that need least disk: DayZ's server is a few gigabytes and its mod lists are tens. And the games with persistent, explorable worlds - Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid - grow from the world side, so their requirement is set by how long the world lives rather than by the install. Game server requirements by game puts the disk figure beside RAM, CPU and ports for every game in the RE:NODE catalogue.

Why updates need free space#

SteamCMD downloads changed content into a staging area inside the same install, verifies it, and then swaps it in. For a moment, both the old and the new version of every changed file exist on disk. A large update to a 30 GB game can need several gigabytes of free space that will be released again a minute later.

If that space is not there, the update fails partway, often with an error that says nothing about disk. Common ones:

Error! App '896660' state is 0x202 after update job.Error! App '258550' state is 0x602 after update job.

The state codes vary, and not every non-zero state is a disk problem, but a failed update on a nearly full disk almost always is. A half-applied update can also leave a server that starts and then crashes on load, or refuses connections with a version mismatch. The fix is the same in every case: free space, then run the update again with validate so SteamCMD checks every file. SteamCMD explained covers the states, validate and beta branches.

How worlds and saves grow#

Game worlds grow in three different ways, and each needs a different kind of attention.

Exploration growth. Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid, Valheim and Terraria store terrain as players reveal it. A Minecraft server stores the world in region files of 32 by 32 chunks; a world explored by a busy public server grows by gigabytes over months, and a pregenerated border of 10,000 blocks in each direction can run well past ten gigabytes before anyone builds anything. A world border stops the growth at a size you choose - world borders and pregeneration covers it.

Construction growth. Survival games with persistent bases - Rust, ARK, DayZ, Palworld - store every structure and item. The world file grows across a wipe cycle and resets when the world is wiped. Size for the end of the cycle.

History growth. Some data is never cleaned up unless you do it: player data for everyone who ever joined, plugin databases, statistics, chat logs, block-logging tables in Minecraft that record every block change. A CoreProtect database on a busy server can outgrow the world itself unless its purge command is run on a schedule.

Mods, workshop content and caches#

Mods are the most variable item on any server's disk.

• Workshop downloads. Games with Steam Workshop support download items into a workshop folder, usually steamapps/workshop/content/<appid>/ under the install, though a few games keep their own cache instead. Garry's Mod, Arma 3, DayZ, Project Zomboid, Unturned and Counter-Strike 2 all pull content from the Workshop. A collection of a hundred items can be several gigabytes, and old items are not always removed when you drop them from the list. Steam Workshop mods on dedicated servers covers how each game handles it.
• Mod copies. Some setups keep a workshop copy and a server copy of the same mod - DayZ and Arma 3 mod folders copied out of the workshop directory are the classic case - doubling their size.
• Streamed assets. FiveM serves custom vehicles, maps and clothing to clients and builds a cache folder from them. A large roleplay server's resources and cache together are easily tens of gigabytes.
• Web maps. Minecraft's Dynmap and BlueMap render the world into image tiles. Rendered at high detail, the tile folder for a large world can be bigger than the world. Render fewer zoom levels or use a lower-resolution setting, and see web maps with Dynmap and BlueMap for the trade-offs.

Logs, crash dumps and local backups#

These three are where disk disappears without anyone deciding to use it.

Logs. Most games write a new log per start and never delete old ones. A verbose Source server, a Minecraft server with a chatty plugin, or a FiveM server printing debug output can write hundreds of megabytes a week. Minecraft compresses old logs into logs/*.log.gz but keeps them forever. Logs worth keeping covers which logs are worth the space and how long.

Crash dumps. Unity and Unreal servers write dump files when they crash, and a server in a crash loop can write dozens of them, each sometimes hundreds of megabytes. Look for .dmp files and crashes folders after any unstable week.

Local backups. Valheim's -backups, 7 Days to Die's world backups, Minecraft backup plugins and Palworld's backup folder all write copies of the world beside it. Four backups of a 2 GB world are 8 GB. They also protect against less than people think: a copy on the same disk survives a corrupt save but not a deleted server or a failed disk. Backups that actually restore explains the difference.

On RE:NODE, panel backups are stored off the machine they protect, which is what makes them backups rather than second copies, and backup slots come with every plan. Built-in game backups still write to the server's own disk, so either keep their count low or turn them off in favour of panel backups.

A worked example: a Paper server for one year#

A community plans a Paper survival server for about thirty players, with a world border, a web map and the usual plugins, and wants to know how much disk it will need by the end of its first year rather than on day one.

1. The install. The server jar, its libraries and the plugin jars are well under 1 GB. Round up to 1 GB.
2. The world. A border of 7,500 blocks in each direction, pregenerated, for the overworld; smaller borders for the Nether and the End. Pregeneration of that area plus a year of building lands somewhere in the range of 8 to 15 GB across the three dimensions. Call it 12 GB.
3. The web map. A detailed render of the same area can be as large as the world again. Rendering fewer zoom levels halves it. Budget 8 GB.
4. Plugin data. A block logger such as CoreProtect, purged to keep 30 days, plus economy, claims and statistics data. 2 to 4 GB on a busy server. Budget 3 GB.
5. Logs. Compressed daily logs kept for 90 days. Under 1 GB.
6. Local backups. None, because backups go to the panel and are stored elsewhere. If a backup plugin were writing copies beside the world, add two or three times the world size here.
7. Headroom. A quarter on top of the 25 GB above, so roughly 6 GB more.

That totals about 31 GB, which on a ladder of plan sizes points to the tier with 30 to 50 GB of disk rather than the smallest one. The same exercise for a friends' server with no web map and no border would come out under 10 GB. The value of doing the arithmetic is not the precision of the result but the list: it is the web map, the block logger and the local backups that people forget, and they are what fill the disk.

Finding what filled the disk#

When a server runs out of space, find the culprit before deleting anything. On a VDS or anywhere you have a shell:

$ df -h /home/container$ du -sh /home/container/* | sort -h | tail -15$ du -sh /home/container/logs /home/container/crashes 2>/dev/null$ find /home/container -name "*.dmp" -size +50M$ find /home/container/logs -name "*.log.gz" -mtime +30 -delete

df -h shows how full the volume is; du -sh * | sort -h lists the largest top-level folders, largest last. Work down into whichever is biggest. The last line deletes compressed logs older than thirty days, which is safe on Minecraft and should be adapted for other games' log layouts. ncdu, where installed, does the same interactively and is faster for exploring.

On a panel host without a shell, the file manager shows folder sizes and can delete in bulk, and SFTP clients can do the same. Look first in logs, crash dump folders, local backup folders, workshop content and web map tiles - in that order, those five account for most surprise full disks. Game server disk space full walks through the cleanup for each game.

Disk size versus disk speed#

Disk size and disk speed are separate questions, and buying more of one does nothing for the other. Speed matters for a few specific operations: world saves that block the game while they write, chunk and region loading as players explore, server start, backups and restores. It does not make a CPU-bound server tick faster. What NVMe actually changes goes through which operations feel it.

RE:NODE runs NVMe on every plan, on a ZFS pool, so the speed question is answered and the remaining question is size. Each game's plan ladder states its disk allocation - from 5 GB on the smallest Terraria and Counter-Strike 1.6 tiers up to 100 GB on the largest Minecraft, 7 Days to Die and Arma 3 tiers - and moving up a tier raises the allocation on the server you already have.

FAQ#

How much free disk space should a game server have?

At least 20% of the allocation, and 30% on games with large, frequent updates or big mod lists. Most of it exists for updates, which need room for old and new files at once. The rest absorbs logs, crash dumps and save growth between cleanups.

Why did my server update fail with a strange state code?

On a nearly full disk, almost always space. SteamCMD reports a non-zero state after the update job rather than saying the disk is full. Free several gigabytes, then run the update again with validate so every file is checked.

Do backups count against my server's disk?

Built-in game backups do, because they are written into the server's own folders. How panel backups are counted depends on the host. On RE:NODE they are stored off the machine they protect, which is the property that matters if the server itself is lost.

How big does a Minecraft world get?

It depends on exploration. A small group's world might stay under a few gigabytes for a year; a public server where players explore freely can reach tens of gigabytes. A world border caps it, and pregenerating inside the border tells you the final size in advance.

Is a bigger disk faster?

No. Capacity and speed are separate. A server that stutters during saves needs faster storage or smaller saves, not more gigabytes. A server whose updates fail needs more free space, not faster storage.