Why We Raised Hytale's Minimum Server RAM from 4GB to 6GB

When Hytale launched into early access, we followed the official documentation and offered 4GB as our minimum plan. That turned out to be a mistake.

Over half of our 4GB Hytale servers experienced out-of-memory crashes. We spent weeks trying to work around it with heap size adjustments and other optimizations, but the reality is simple: 4GB just isn’t enough for most real-world use cases. As of today, we’ve raised our minimum to 6GB for new Hytale servers.

If you’re running a 4GB server with us right now, you’re not required to upgrade. But if you’re hitting crashes, this post explains why that’s happening and what your options are.

What Changed and Why

Starting today, WinterNode’s minimum plan for Hytale servers is 6GB of RAM instead of 4GB. We’re also no longer offering 5GB plans. Our official recommendation remains 8GB, especially for modded servers or anything with more than a couple of players.

This wasn’t an arbitrary decision. Hytale’s official documentation still lists 4GB as the minimum requirement, and we trusted that when we launched support for the game. But early access titles are moving targets, and the official specs don’t always reflect what happens when real players are on real servers.

We’ve seen this before. When Palworld launched, Pocketpair recommended 6GB. In practice, stable multiplayer servers needed 16GB. Hytale’s gap isn’t quite that dramatic, but the pattern is the same: early access games evolve, and their resource requirements grow faster than the documentation updates.

What We Saw in Production

The problems started showing up about a week after launch. Servers would run fine for a while, then hit an out-of-memory crash. Over time, we began hearing about it from more and more clients. The pattern was consistent enough that we could predict it: servers with 3 or more concurrent players, or servers where people had explored a lot of chunks, would eventually run out of headroom, leading to cyclical out-of-memory crashes.

We tried mitigation strategies. The most promising was adjusting the max heap size percentage from 75% down to 50%, which gives the JVM more breathing room for off-heap memory. For some servers, this bought time - sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes an hour. But it was always temporary. The crashes came back.

Mods made everything worse, which isn’t surprising. Even a handful of mods add entities, scripts, and data that all compete for the same limited memory pool. Modded 4GB servers were particularly prone to crashes.

The frustrating part is that these crashes weren’t always immediate or obvious. A server might run smoothly for days, then hit critical mass as the world grew or more players logged in. By the time customers contacted support, they’d already invested time in their world and were understandably frustrated.

Why the Official Minimum Isn’t Enough

Early access games are works in progress. Hytale is being actively developed, which means features get added, systems get refactored, and resource usage changes. The 4GB recommendation was probably accurate at some point, but it doesn’t match the current build.

Here’s what actually eats memory in a Hytale server:

Player count matters more than you’d think. Each player brings their own inventory, location data, and active chunks. Three players don’t use 3x the memory of one player, but the overhead adds up faster than the official specs suggest.

World exploration has a cost. Hytale keeps explored chunks loaded in memory, at least partially. A server where players have spread out and explored aggressively will use significantly more RAM than one where everyone sticks to a small area. This is exacerbated by a higher maximum view radius.

Mods are RAM multipliers. Even simple mods introduce new entities, mechanics, or data structures. A 4GB server might handle vanilla Hytale with one player, but add a few mods and you’re over the edge.

The heap size adjustments we tried were an attempt to give the JVM more flexibility, but they’re fundamentally a band-aid. You can tune how Java allocates the memory it has, but you can’t create memory that doesn’t exist. When the server genuinely needs more than 4GB to operate, no amount of tuning fixes that.

What This Means for You

If you’re currently running a 4GB Hytale server with us, nothing changes unless you want it to. You’re not being forced to upgrade. But if you’re experiencing crashes or performance issues, upgrading to 6GB or 8GB will almost certainly solve them.

For new customers, 6GB is now the starting point. At $1.99 per GB, that’s $11.94/month. No hidden fees, no extra charges for CPU or storage - just straightforward pricing.

Here’s how we’d break down the recommendations based on what we’ve seen:

We still officially recommend 8GB because it gives you headroom to grow. If your server starts small but attracts more players, or if you decide to add mods later, you won’t immediately hit a ceiling. You can also choose to upgrade later, and only need to pay the difference between plans.

That said, 6GB is a reasonable floor for vanilla servers with light usage. We’ve seen stable performance from 6GB servers that stay within those constraints. The crashes we tracked were overwhelmingly on 4GB servers.

Our Recommendation

If you’re starting a new Hytale server, go with 8GB unless you’re confident you’ll stay vanilla and small. The extra $4/month buys you a lot of peace of mind.

If you’re on 4GB now and experiencing crashes, upgrading is the most reliable fix. We tried every optimization we could think of to make 4GB work, and the temporary fixes just weren’t sustainable.

If you’re on 4GB and things are running fine, you can stay there. But keep an eye on performance as your world grows or if you add players. The crashes tend to sneak up on you.

We know this is frustrating, especially for customers who trusted our initial 4GB offering. Early access games are unpredictable, and we should have been more conservative with our minimum specs from the start. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but hope you can understand why we made this decision.

We’ve put together several Hytale guides in our help center if you want to dig into setup details or optimization: WinterNode Hytale Guides

All our Game Servers are priced at $1.99/GB of RAM with no extra charges for CPU, storage, or features other hosts mark up. Everything’s backed by our 48-hour refund policy, so there’s no risk in trying things out.

Got questions about upgrading or server performance? Our support team responds to tickets with actual humans, and we’re active on Discord if you prefer chatting there.