How Much RAM Does a 7 Days to Die Server Need?
Start at 8 GB. The Fun Pimps publish no server formula, but they ask 8 GB of the game itself, and a world that has been played on climbs past 4 GB on its own.
4 min read · Updated Oct 25, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team
Start at 8 GB. That is our base plan and it covers the standard eight player server properly. Move to 12 GB or 16 GB if you run an overhaul mod, and 24 GB for an overhaul with a full server on it.
Why there is no formula
Some games publish one. The Fun Pimps do not: there is no official dedicated server specification and no per player figure anywhere on their site, their support pages or their forum. What they do publish is the game's own requirement, which is the same on Windows, macOS and Linux: 8 GB minimum, 12 GB recommended. They also say, in those same requirements, that running a server and a client on one machine doubles what you need. That sentence is about hosting on your gaming PC. It is not a claim that a server on its own wants 16 GB, although plenty of hosting pages quote it as if it were.
So the honest answer is built from the game's own number and from what servers actually use.
What a server actually uses
A freshly generated default world sits around 2 GB with nobody on it. That figure is the one you will find in older tables, and on its own it makes 4 GB look like plenty. Two things move it:
- The save ages. Every chunk a player visits is kept, and the world file grows with it. A world a group has played on for a few weeks uses noticeably more than the one you generated on Friday.
- Players. Each person has a slice of the world loaded around them, and the server holds all of those at once.
Put together, a default sized map with a few people on it climbs past 4 GB in ordinary use, which is why we do not sell a 4 GB plan for this game. 8 GB leaves room for the world to grow and for all eight slots to be full at once.
The tiers, and who each is for
- 8 GB is the base plan. The shipped eight slot configuration, a default or pregenerated map, no mods or a handful of small ones.
- 12 GB is for an overhaul mod such as Darkness Falls or Undead Legacy, or for raising the player count above eight.
- 16 GB is an overhaul with a busy server on it, or a 10240 map with a dozen people exploring different corners of it.
- 24 GB is a heavy overhaul with sixteen or more players. Past this point you are better off with two servers than one.
RAM is not the fix for horde night
This is the most useful thing on this page. Blood moon lag is almost never a memory problem. The game runs its main loop on one thread, and a blood moon spikes zombie pathfinding, block physics and corpse handling at the same moment, all on that thread. Adding memory does nothing for it.
What does help is turning down the two settings that decide how much the server has to think about at once, both on the Server settings page in the panel:
- Zombies alive at once, whole map. The game's own file warns that much above 80 makes a server run badly. The default is 64.
- Maximum view distance, which has the biggest effect of anything here. Dropping it from 12 to 8 leaves the server loading well under half as much world per player.
7 Days to Die server settings covers both, and choosing a world and a map size covers the third lever, which is how big the map is in the first place.
Watch what yours is doing
The Usage card on your server's Overview and Console tabs shows live memory use with a history chart. Look at it with a normal number of people online, not on an empty server. If it sits near the limit during play and saves start taking a visible moment in the console, that is your signal to move up a tier.
Upgrading later
Your world is not touched by a RAM change.
- Sign in at customer.guavahost.com, open My servers and click Manage on your 7 Days to Die server.
- Click Manage plan, then Change plan.
- Pick the RAM you want and click Next step until you reach Check and confirm, which shows what is due today for the rest of your billing period.
- Press Confirm and pay, and complete the payment if you are asked to.
Common questions
Will 4 GB run a 7 Days to Die server?
It will start one, and for two people on a small pregenerated map it may be fine for a while. It leaves nothing for the world to grow into and nothing for mods, which is why our base plan is 8 GB instead. We would rather sell you a server that is still comfortable in three months.
Does a bigger map need much more memory?
Less than it used to. On current versions the whole supported range, from 6144 up to 10240, spans only a few hundred megabytes of difference. The old tables showing a 10240 map needing several gigabytes more than a 6144 one describe a version of the game from several years ago.
Does the number of players matter more than the map?
Yes, and view distance matters more than either. Each player loads a slice of the world around them, so eight people in eight different places is the most expensive thing you can ask of the server. That is exactly what the view distance setting controls.
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