Questions about Renting a Server

[MagicPuncher 29]

I have rented from the guys over at SurvivalServers.net many times for all my Ark needs and always had a great experience. However for Atlas, I'm not sure if renting from them or anyone would make for a great experience. My understanding is that renting one server would equal one grid square from the official servers. That brings up the first question:

Which square is it? Do I get to pick? Because some squares only have one Island. And if there is only one island on your server there is no point in building a boat, at which point you would be better off playing Ark. Even the squares that have 2 or 3 smaller islands, there's still not a whole lot of reasons to build a boat, as they probably have very similar resources and creatures. And certainly nothing bigger than a raft would ever be necessary. 

This being the case, I think it's safe to say that there is no point at all in renting a 1 grid server. It breaks the entire point of the game. So looking at renting multiple servers and tying them together, I would think you would need at least a 3x3 grid to keep the intended gameplay intact. But that's 9 servers. Using Survival Server's pricing as an example, for a 10 player server (I play with a small group of friends and 10 is more than enough), that's $12.60 per server per month times 9 servers equals $113.40 per month. I don't think that's worth it, especially for a neutered experience of a comparably tiny map. A tiny map that presumably wouldn't even have all the biomes.

But that got me thinking. The official servers are designed for 150 people per server. If I'm renting a 10 person server, shouldn't it be possible for that server to cover a much larger area if there are only 10 people? Like 15X? If I could get a 4 x 4 grid for only 10 people for $12.60/month I would be all over that. And it might be too much to ask for at this point, but that 4 x 4 grid would need to be a scaled down representation of the whole map, by which I mean have all the biomes (snow islands at the top and bottom, tropical in the middle and temperate in between), and have islands with the Armies of the Damned, etc (not sure all that's out there), and the whole map would need to connect at the edges as the full map does.

[Disko187 0]

You can rent a one by one and put as many islands as you want on it, do a little more research.

[Lynx 92]

Learn to make custom maps, then rent a server. That way you can decide how many grids you want/need.

[MagicPuncher 29]

49 minutes ago, Disko187 said:

You can rent a one by one and put as many islands as you want on it, do a little more research.

I haven't heard anything about that. Can you provide a source?

[Lynx 92]

9 minutes ago, MagicPuncher said:

I haven't heard anything about that. Can you provide a source?

The pinned thread had the github link to the map tool.

[MagicPuncher 29]

21 minutes ago, Lynx said:

The pinned thread had the github link to the map tool.

Awesome. I'll check it out.

[SurvivalServers.com 2]

We're still working out all the kinks with multi server setup but single servers are customizable using the grid to support a deceent size group of islands.

Hoping to get see some templates out in the wild so we can start catering to different sizes and combinations of islands!

[MagicPuncher 29]

1 hour ago, SurvivalServers.com said:

We're still working out all the kinks with multi server setup but single servers are customizable using the grid to support a deceent size group of islands.

Hoping to get see some templates out in the wild so we can start catering to different sizes and combinations of islands!

Awesome! Been playing with the map editor, and it looks great. I'll be very interested to see if there is a pricing break for multiserver setups.