Stormworks use Steam networking, so all you need is to host a game and your friends can join you (or you can invite them). Just like in many other games that on Steam.

Initially, only a host player is able to spawn vehicles so if you want to let your friends have access to workbench too then type a simple chat command:

Where <id> is the player ID from the player list (a tilde ~ hotkey by default).

The same goes for the public servers - you will need to ask an admin to authorize you first using the same chat command.

In most of the cases, there shouldn't be any issues, because modern firewalls can automatically allow all needed connections. But, if your friends can't see your game, then you should change settings of your firewall to allow Steam P2P inbound and outbound connections: https://ad.gamersky.info/@support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8571-GLVN-8711

If your friends can see your game, but can't join (“Waiting for server…” message) then you should allow inbound and outbound connections for Stormworks game in your Firewall.

Being a physics sandbox game, Stormworks is very dependant on CPU* and GPU** performance. But unlike other games, we are trying to not limit the players by the number of physical bodies, light sources and picture-in-picture rendering. That means that there are vehicles and scenes that can and will lag on other systems (sometimes they even lag on the creators' systems as well).

Roughly speaking, spawning a huge ship with lots of light sources and cameras will be a nightmare for many systems. Or it can be multiple less big and less complex ships (see Benchmark 3 for example).

* Spawning large and complex vehicles will require more time for physics simulation and eventually can lead to slowing down the speed of the game. It may not affect your actual framerate so you can feel it as a slow-motion effect.

** Spawning vehicles that have many spotlights, flares, cameras and monitors will affect render and reduce your framerate.

The things get more complicated here because is the server responsible for the physics of all the vehicles and many other simulations. Plus it requires a good network bandwidth to keep all clients in sync and, besides the quality of the network on both sides, the distance between player and server will affect latency no matter what.

In other words, if you want to play with friends then make the host be the one with a beefy PC and good internet.

As for playing on public dedicated servers please be responsible for the vehicles you spawn. Try to use multiplayer optimized vehicles and just small and medium-size vehicles only. Please, despawn your vehicles before leaving a server and despawn any abandoned vehicles too.

Otherwise, we afraid that server owners will start locking their servers from the public.

Please, read this guide on Steam: https://ad.gamersky.info/@steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1995371855

CPU: Intel Core i5-4440 (3.10 GHz) / AMD Ryzen 3 1200 (3.10 GHz)
RAM: 4 GB *
GPU: Intel HD 6000 / GeForce GTX 550 Ti / AMD R7 250 (AMD Radeon HD 7750) **
OS: Windows 7 / 8 / 10, Mac OS X 10.8+

* In most cases, the game takes less than 1.5 GB of RAM but for some complex scenes (with large vehicles or their number) it can go up to 3 GB. We recommend using a 32-bit version of the game for users with 8 GB of RAM or less to save up more memory for other applications and the system itself.
** Graphics card must support OpenGL 3.2 or higher

We strongly recommend you to use the Report a Bug button which you can find in top right corner of the game menu. This way we will see much more info about possible issue.

If you can't get in the main menu or you just want to make an suggestion then you can create a ticket here: http://mcro.org/issues/1

Please, always include detailed info about the issue. Especially a reproduction steps and a vehicle example (a link to an item on Steam Workshop for example). If you experience a game crash then upload the most recent minidump file and leave a link to it a ticket description.

All your vehicles are saved here: %appdata%\Stormworks\data\vehicles
Your mission playlists stored here %appdata%\Stormworks\data\missions
World saves are located here: %appdata%\Stormworks\saves

MacOS users will find those folders here Library/Application Support/Stormworks

Best and easiest way to find it is right-clicking Stormworks in Steam library then Properties > Local files > Show local files…

It's our own engine written in C++. We use Bullet as the physics engine.

Join our official Discord to get more information and help from our community: https://discord.gg/stormworks

Modding Stormworks is generally allowed. However, modifying executable code to crack, cheat, grief, hack, or other malicious or illegal behaviour is not allowed, and likely to result in a VAC or game ban on Steam.