Sven Co-op is a GoldSrc co-op game, but the modern dedicated server is standalone and free. You do not need to own Half-Life and you do not need a Steam login on the server. It installs as one app, launches with one command, and ships about a hundred maps built in. Here is the setup.

Install the server

The Sven Co-op Dedicated Server is app 276060 and installs anonymously. It is standalone, so there is no Half-Life mod step, just the one app_update (about 0.8 GB):

./steamcmd.sh +login anonymous \
  +app_update 276060 validate \
  +quit

The game folder is svencoop, and the config it reads on boot is:

<install>/svencoop/server.cfg

A vanilla server.cfg

Name and passwords go here. Change the lines marked CHANGE ME:

hostname "My Sven Co-op Server"      // CHANGE ME
rcon_password "pick-a-long-secret"   // CHANGE ME
sv_password ""                       // a word here = private, blank = open
sv_lan 0
mp_timelimit 60                      // minutes before the map rotates

The launch line

Sven Co-op has its own launch wrapper, svends_run, at the install root. The starting map and player cap are arguments:

./svends_run -game svencoop -console \
  -port 27015 \
  +map svencoop \
  +maxplayers 16

• maxplayers goes up to 32. Sven Co-op scales enemy strength to the number of connected players, so a bigger server is a harder server.
• +map svencoop starts the original campaign. The server rotates through the built-in maps on its own after that.
• Port 27015 is the game and query port. Open UDP in your firewall.

Make yourself admin

Admin in Sven Co-op is not a password, it is a list of SteamIDs. Put your SteamID64 in svencoop/admins.txt, one per line, and you get admin_kick, admin_ban, admin_slay and the rest in the console:

<install>/svencoop/admins.txt

76561198000000000
76561198000000001

admins.txt is separate from server.cfg. Edit it, then restart the server (or reload the admin list) for the change to take.

Maps and custom content

About a hundred official co-op maps ship with the server, so nobody has to download anything to play them. Community maps are a bigger job: players only receive them if you run a FastDL host (an HTTP mirror of your maps folder, set with sv_downloadurl). Without it, a custom map loads on the server but joiners get stuck missing the files. For a night with friends the built-in maps are more than enough.

See also

• Sven Co-op commands, how friends join, and changing map
• Skip the setup: deploy a Sven Co-op server by the hour