Stationeers Dedicated Server — Docker/Wine

This builds a complete, unmodified Stationeers Dedicated Server image from an existing SteamCMD installation. It is for a normal Docker host, not Pterodactyl. The game tree is one immutable image layer shared by every container. Each server gets only its own persistent saves, mods, scripts, settings and Wine prefix.

The image also installs the version-pinned official BepInEx 5.4.23.5 and StationeersLaunchPad 1.1.0 Dedicated Server packages. Its configuration and logs persist below server-01/bepinex/. The legacy StationeersMods loader must not coexist with LaunchPad; the build stops if it finds it.

Build on the host

The SteamCMD installation must already be complete at /root/stationeers (or pass its path as the first argument). This never sends Steam credentials or downloads the game.

cd /root/KI/flixwolf/stationeers-docker
chmod +x build-image.sh stationeers-ksm.sh
./build-image.sh /root/stationeers

The build creates flixwolf/stationeers-dedicated:latest and the first persistent state directory at runtime/server-01/.

Start one server

cp docker-compose.example.yml runtime/compose.yml
cd runtime
docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f stationeers

Edit server-01/setting.xml while the container is stopped to set the name, password, ports, visibility and world/server settings. UDP 32715 and 32716 are published by the sample compose file. Additional servers need their own data directory, container name and two unique host UDP ports.

The container is non-root, has a read-only root filesystem, drops all Linux capabilities, and persists no writable state outside ./server-01.

Measured resource profile

These measurements were taken on the Flixwolf host with fresh, comparable Wine-based dedicated-server instances after the Unity startup phase. They are planning figures, not hard limits: world complexity, player count, mods and the Wine/Unity version change the result.

Configuration	Measured physical RAM (PSS)	Result
One normal instance, no KSM	about 4.35–4.55 GiB	Baseline after full startup
Two normal instances with KSM and the 8 MiB threshold	about 1.9 GiB shared in total	roughly 0.9–1.0 GiB saved per comparable additional instance
First-container observation during current startup	about 2.5 GiB container memory	transient; do not size capacity from this alone

KSM becomes more effective as more near-identical servers run concurrently. It is a host-wide kernel feature, so enable it only after validating normal startup and mods. The 8 MiB marking threshold was the practical balance: a 2 MiB threshold added only about 74 MiB of extra merge candidates while roughly doubling the number of marked memory mappings.

There is deliberately no material disk-space reduction. The complete game tree remains in the shared immutable image so that future mods and updates stay compatible. The resulting image is about 7.0 GB; each extra server persists only its own saves, mods, settings, Wine prefix and BepInEx state.

Optional KSM sharing

The image includes the tested Wine mapping interposer. It remains off until both host KSM is enabled and KSM_PRELOAD: "1" is set for that instance. With two comparable fresh servers, the tested 8-MiB threshold saved about 1.9 GiB total physical memory. KSM is host-wide, so validate one normal server first, then enable it deliberately:

sudo ./stationeers-ksm.sh status
sudo ./stationeers-ksm.sh enable
# Observe at least two matching server instances.
sudo ./stationeers-ksm.sh status
sudo ./stationeers-ksm.sh disable

disable actively unmerges pages and restores the scanner's former values.