Enshrouded vs Valheim (2026): Both Hit 1.0 — Which Should Your Group Host?

Valheim left Early Access on September 9, 2026. Enshrouded followed on October 15. Two games that chased the same audience for two and a half years are now, five weeks apart, both finished products competing for the same winter.

Valheim is a homestead you keep for years. Enshrouded is a season you finish. That one difference decides what you rent, and it's the part every comparison skips. Valheim is a world your group comes back to for a decade; Enshrouded is a campaign with an ending, and an ending changes what you want from a server.

The short answer, in a table

Same price, different upgrade path. $16/mo either way for 6GB and 2 dedicated cores, 12 off-site backups every 2 hours, four US and EU regions. What you add later is where they part: RAM on Valheim, cores on Enshrouded. Valheim plans → · Enshrouded plans →

The server-resource row is the whole article in miniature. First, the question most groups are deciding.

What each 1.0 shipped

Valheim 1.0 delivered the Deep North, the eighth and final biome and the one the game had been pointing at since 2021. Iron Gate's patch notes list 40+ new weapons, four armour sets, 10+ creatures, 80+ buildable pieces and a Unity engine upgrade underneath all of it. If you last played during Mistlands, this is a substantially different game, and the engine change is why it feels different before you can say why.

Enshrouded 1.0 opened the whole map. Cinder's Cradle — a lava waste with ruins underneath and floating islands above — fills in north of the Veilwater Basin, two new Hollow Halls and six extra Shroud roots fill in the edges of older biomes, and the main story reaches its conclusion. The level cap went to 50, gear to 55, and Flame Altars to sixteen per world. The renderer was rewritten, and the major survivors and lore notes are now fully voiced.

Both are complete games now, for the first time.

Does Enshrouded have crossplay?

No. There is no crossplay in Enshrouded, and a PS5 player cannot join a PC dedicated server — not by join code, not through a relay, not at all. Keen's Julien Koenen told Eurogamer.de in July 2026 that crossplay would not be ready for the 1.0 launch, and the studio has described it as a goal with no date since. Xbox Series X|S arrives in spring 2027, and that's a separate platform, not a bridge to your PC world.

What does cross platforms is Adventure Sharing — players can swap worlds and dungeons between PC and PS5. That's passing a save around, not playing together on one. If your group is mixed, plan your 1.0 server as a PC server and accept that the console half sits this one out.

Valheim is the opposite: crossplay is live across every platform the game ships on. Which brings us to the part people get wrong.

Mods vs crossplay on Valheim: what actually conflicts

Yes. Crossplay moves Valheim's networking off Steam and onto PlayFab, a Microsoft relay service. But BepInEx loads normally alongside it, and a maintained mod detects the PlayFab backend and patches for it. Here's a real boot from a crossplay server with mods running:

[Info : BepInEx] Loading [MaxPlayerCount 1.2.4]
[Message: BepInEx] Chainloader startup complete
[Info :MaxPlayerCount] Patching for backend: PlayFab
[Info : Unity Log] Logged in PlayFab user via custom ID

What limits you is the console client, not the networking mode. PS5, Switch 2 and Xbox players cannot install mods. There's no loader, no plugin folder, no mechanism. So the constraint is about the mod, not your server.

A server-side mod (player counts, rates, world tweaks) works fine on a crossplay server with console players in it, because nobody joining has to install anything. A mod that every client must also install (new build pieces, models, UI) is PC-only in practice. That second category is the bigger one, which is why "modded Valheim is PC-only" is the rule people reach for. Check each mod's page: if it says clients need it too, console players are out.

One setting worth knowing about. The BepInEx server setup ships with crossplay disabled, a sensible default since a modded server is usually a PC server. So if you install mods and your console players suddenly can't get in, that's why. It's a flag, not a limitation, but you have to know to look for it.

The decision, then:

Enshrouded doesn't have this problem, because it has no crossplay to trade against. Nothing to check, nothing to configure. But there's also no mixed-platform group at all: a PS5 player cannot join a PC Enshrouded server, and there's no relay to route them through. Keen's Julien Koenen told Eurogamer.de in July 2026 that crossplay wouldn't be ready for launch, and the studio has described it as a goal with no date since. Xbox arrives in spring 2027. Plan your Enshrouded server as a PC server.

And on both games: console players can join a rented server, but they can't host one. That's a platform decision, not a hosting one, and neither developer has suggested it's changing.

Why Valheim's server is a middleman and Enshrouded's does the work

This single difference explains almost every performance story you'll read about either game.

Valheim's dedicated server does not simulate the game. It relays traffic and serves world data. The authority for what's happening in a given area sits with the client — whoever is in a zone first effectively becomes its host, and the server passes that state around. The Valheim wiki is blunt about it: the server "does not simulate any of the game logic — it is not server-side authoritative."

That has real consequences you can feel. The famous one is boats: whoever steps aboard first takes ownership of the vessel, and if that's a passenger rather than the pilot, the boat can refuse to move for the person steering it. That isn't a bug. That's client authority doing exactly what client authority does. It's also why lag and desync in Valheim track who is in the area rather than how much you're paying for the box.

Enshrouded's server runs the world. It's a Windows binary doing the simulation itself, which is why Keen specifies it by CPU and player count rather than by RAM. Their published guidance asks for a 6-core/12-thread i7 at 3.2GHz for four to six players, and an 8-core/16-thread at 3.7GHz for sixteen, with 16GB of RAM in both cases.

That 16GB and the low single digits further down are both true, because they measure different things. Keen is sizing a whole machine you own, with an OS and everything else running on it; the server process itself is far smaller. One isn't a correction of the other.

It's also server-authoritative, unlike Valheim: the server decides what's true and clients follow. That's why a mod installed on an Enshrouded server applies to everyone who joins, and why your players usually install nothing.

So the two games put the load in different places:

So how much server does each game need?

Valheim is a memory problem. Iron Gate's own floor is 2GB, which boots a world and not much else. The community consensus, which the wiki labels unofficial, is 4GB+ and a hexa-core for a real group. What drives it up is exploration: a fresh world sits around 1.8–2.4GB, and every loaded area where players are active adds roughly 100–300MB, with high-instance builds costing considerably more. A world six months deep needs more box than one you made last night, and no amount of CPU fixes that.

Enshrouded is a core problem. Memory barely moves. Keen's own documentation puts the server process in the low single-digit gigabytes even for a full sixteen, and this plan's 6GB covers the cap with room for a world that grows. What you spend on is cores. On our fleet, two dedicated cores are comfortable for two players and can carry three. Past that it's roughly one extra core for every couple of players.

So what does a six-person group actually buy? About four cores. Two carry the first three players, then one more for each pair after that. That's the upgrade to ask for, and it's one we'll trial with you before you pay for it. We haven't run a full sixteen, so we're not going to quote a core count for one.

The practical consequence: if you're moving from Valheim to Enshrouded, the upgrade that matters is CPU, not RAM. Most hosts sell this game in RAM tiers that step up as your group grows, which is the wrong dial, and it's why the same six gigabytes can feel like plenty on one game and tight on the other.

How many players fit?

Enshrouded: 16. Valheim: 10. Both are the developers' caps, not ours, and neither is a number a host can quietly raise.

Valheim's ten can be raised, and the mod that does it is friendlier than the folklore suggests. MaxPlayerCount is a BepInEx plugin that is server-side only: you set one number in a config file and nobody joining installs anything, console players included. Run it with crossplay on and a console group can join a server with more than ten slots.

Worth knowing before someone promises your twelve-person Discord a Valheim server: the ten is Iron Gate's own line, in their words, "Servers are capped at 10 players."

Enshrouded's sixteen is the higher ceiling and the simpler story: no mods needed, no trade-off, and the Nitro panel won't let you set more.

We don't sell player slots on either game. There's no eight-person tier and no upsell when an eleventh friend wants in. On a game where groups finish and drift, paying per seat is a bad deal, and it's not one we're interested in selling.

Two save systems, two ways to lose a world

Both games protect you less than you'd think, and they fail in completely different ways. This is the section to read if your group is attached to its world, which — judging by the subreddits — most of them are.

Valheim changed its save format at 1.0, and that invalidates a lot of advice still online. The old .db + .fwl file pair is gone. A world is now a folder named after the world, holding _main.N.fwl2 (metadata and seed), _main.N.db2 (world data), a .chunks index, the terrain chunk files themselves, and an .ok marker written when a save completes.

The upside is real. Iron Gate's stated reason is a system that "splits world data across chunks to reduce how much data is serialized and written" and is "designed to be resilient against mid-write failures." Only the chunks that changed get rewritten, so the 20-minute autosave stalls your server less than it used to, and an interrupted save is far less likely to leave you something that looks loadable and isn't.

The trap is that the folder is the unit. Copy part of it and Valheim won't find a world it can load under that name. It generates a brand-new one and leaves your fragments unreachable. Back up the whole folder, or don't bother.

And delete the folder to wipe a world. Guides written before 1.0 tell you to delete .db and .fwl; on 1.0 those files don't exist, so the delete quietly removes nothing and the server boots back into the world you meant to destroy.

If you have a pre-1.0 world, take your own copy before the first 1.0 load. Valheim backs the old pair up automatically and converts it in place, but the conversion is one-way in practice: moving a chunked world back to a pre-1.0 build isn't supported. Don't rely solely on the automatic backup for that one.

Enshrouded's danger is the index file. Each world keeps ten numbered copies and an -index file recording which is live, under a value called latest. You can set that to any number from 0 to 9 to roll a world back, which is useful and also easy to corrupt if you do it while the server is running.

And one shared rule that costs people hours: both servers need a clean shutdown. Valheim writes its save by cloning memory and flushing it; killing the process instead of asking it to stop loses whatever hadn't been written. Enshrouded's server writes every ten minutes, so a hard stop can cost you up to that. On either game, stop the server properly before you touch its files. A guide that tells you otherwise is telling you to gamble.

What it costs, all in

Two notes on that table. Extra cores do very little for Valheim. Its simulation is largely single-thread-bound and the real constraint is memory, so if your world is stuttering, another core usually isn't the fix and we'd rather tell you than take the money. They earn their keep on heavy mod lists and during backups. On Enshrouded it's the reverse: cores are the dial, and RAM additions mostly buy headroom for a world that grows rather than performance today.

One thing worth knowing about how upgrades work, because the table makes it sound tidier than it is: it's a button or a ticket, depending on the server. Some servers have an upgrade button and you change the resources yourself in the portal. Some don't, and then you open a ticket and a person does it. Either way the change is prorated, and either way your world is left alone.

The ticket route is also how you get something that isn't on the list. If what you need doesn't match a plan — or you're already on our largest one and want to go past it — ask anyway. A custom size is a normal thing to ask us for rather than a favour, and nobody minds.

Self-hosting is a real option for both. Valheim ships a free dedicated server tool on Steam with a Windows and Linux guide; Enshrouded's tool is free too. What you're paying a host for is a box that stays up when your PC doesn't, backups that happen while you sleep, an address that doesn't change on your friends, and someone to ask on a Friday night when it won't start. If you're comfortable with port forwarding and a machine that stays on, you'll be fine, and neither developer has made that difficult on purpose.

A homestead or a season? The question that decides how long you pay

Everything above is spec sheet. This is the part that predicts whether you get your money's worth, and it comes down to a difference in what the two games are.

Valheim is a homestead. It's built to be lived in for years, and the community does exactly that. There's a Viking in the Enshrouded subreddit of all places describing the same Valheim world he's kept for five years, five companions long gone, and him still going back to visit the empty village. Iron Gate spent those years adding biomes to worlds people already had. Ten players, one map, effectively forever.

Enshrouded is a season. Keen finished the story at 1.0, reworked the opening hours, and told players they'd probably enjoy it more starting fresh. Groups push the Shroud back, clear the last dungeon, and the Discord goes quiet. A campaign with an ending is part of the appeal, not a flaw in it.

There's a wrinkle in Enshrouded's favour, though. 1.0 added Adventure Sharing, which lets players swap worlds and dungeons across platforms, and the store page's own pitch is that "when the campaign ends, your story doesn't." That's Keen's attempt to grow a tail where the game didn't have one, and how it lands is unsettled.

Why this decides your bill: a homestead justifies a server that runs all year, and a season doesn't. Most groups play either game hard for a month or two and then stop. If you're on Valheim and you'll come back to that same world in six months — which is the whole point of Valheim — you want the world to survive the gap. If you're on Enshrouded and you've finished it, you want the option to stop paying without losing the thing you built.

That's what GameSwap is for, and yes, this is the pitch. It archives a whole server off-site — world, settings, passwords, all of it — and runs something else on the box in the meantime. Every game server gets one free freeze slot. Flex is a billing tier, not an add-on and not a cheaper server — you pay a year up front at $9.99/mo instead of $16 month to month, on the same server, and you get three freeze slots instead of one, with no wait between swaps. So the six gigabytes you rent can be a Valheim homestead this winter and an Enshrouded season next spring without you paying for both.

What we don't know yet

Three things, stated plainly, because a comparison that claims total certainty is overselling.

Enshrouded's crossplay is a promise, not a plan. Keen has described it as a long-term goal with no date, and until it ships, a mixed PC-and-console group should assume Enshrouded is a PC game. If that's your group, Valheim is the answer today and it may not be in a year.

We haven't run either game at its cap. Our Valheim guidance leans on Iron Gate's published floor and the community consensus the wiki labels unofficial; our Enshrouded core guidance is a rule of thumb from our own fleet, not a measurement, and we haven't pushed a sixteen-player server to see where it breaks. When we do, the numbers go here.

Valheim's performance reputation rests on a moving target. The advice you'll find about crossplay causing lag largely predates the 1.0 engine upgrade. Players in the weeks since report it working fine in practice, with the caveat that a crowded-base autosave still costs everyone a second or two. Treat older forum warnings, including some of ours, as being about the version they were written for.

FAQ

Which is better, Valheim or Enshrouded?

Neither, and anyone giving you one answer is selling you something. Valheim is a world you keep for years with full crossplay; Enshrouded is a campaign you finish with twice the player room and no crossplay. Mixed-platform group → Valheim. More than ten people, or you want an ending → Enshrouded.

Can PC and console players play together in Valheim or Enshrouded?

In Valheim, yes — crossplay covers PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PS5 and Switch 2 on one server. In Enshrouded, no. A PS5 player cannot join a PC Enshrouded server, and Xbox doesn't arrive until spring 2027. On both games console players can join a rented server but can't host one.

How many players can join an Enshrouded or Valheim server?

Enshrouded supports 16 and Valheim supports 10, both caps set by the developers rather than by us. Valheim's can be raised with MaxPlayerCount, a server-side mod that asks nothing of the people joining. We don't charge per player slot on either game, so the cap is the game's business, not your bill's.

How much does a Valheim or Enshrouded server cost?

Both are $16/mo at EVLBOX — $15.99 for Enshrouded — for 6GB RAM, two dedicated Ryzen cores and a 20–25GB NVMe disk, with 12 off-site backups every 2 hours included. The games are one-off: $29.99 for Valheim, $39.99 for Enshrouded. Extra RAM is $2/mo per GB on Valheim; on Enshrouded it's an upgrade button where the server has one, and a ticket where it doesn't — and a ticket is also how you ask for a size that isn't on the list. Neither charges by player slot.

Can you run mods on a Valheim server with crossplay on?

Yes. Crossplay moves Valheim's networking onto the PlayFab relay, but BepInEx loads normally alongside it and maintained mods patch for that backend. What limits you is that console clients can't install mods at all, so any mod your players must also install is PC-only in practice. Server-side mods work on a crossplay server with console players in it.

Server architecture and save-system details in this post come from Iron Gate's own documentation, the Valheim wiki, and Keen's published guidance. The sizing rules of thumb and the GameSwap pitch are ours.

Whichever you land on, the same three things are worth doing before your group commits: know which of the two resources you're buying, work out whether your mods are server-side or client-side before someone installs BepInEx, and copy the world off the machine: the whole world folder on Valheim, the savegame folder on Enshrouded.

Ready to rent one?

The plan is the same size on both games. Pick the one your group is actually playing.

If your group is split, or you're moving from one game to the other and want a hand sizing it, come ask in our Discord. We'd rather talk you through it than sell you a box you'll regret.