Pandemonium

Server Details:

We are a PvE-C server with specific PvP times to cater to all players. On the Exiled Lands server, PvP is active from 5:00 PM to 11:30 PM EST. On the Isle of Siptah, PvP hours are from 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM EST. This scheduling means PvP is active for more than half of each day, providing flexibility for players who prefer to avoid PvP by simply switching servers during active hours. On our main servers, building damage is permanently disabled.

The harvest rates are 2x. This matched PvE-C on official servers until the Age of War Chapter 4 update when official servers were reduced to 1x, and we decided to keep ours 2x. Most other features replicate Official with the exception of some balancing to take the game off easy mode, and maybe a few increased spawn rates.

Our Story:

I (Mijin) started playing the game when it was released. At some point around 2020, I finally convinced my wife (Wembley) to play. We played exclusively on PvP servers until it started to feel like work to have to be online to defend every single raid window. So last year, we switched to PvE-C and, to our surprise, it turned out to be more enjoyable than we expected. We spent time on both private and official servers, both with their own pitfalls.

On private servers, you often get admins/mods who tend to abuse their power and also create really cringy sets of rules longer than the Library of Congress. They often don't know how to set up or run a server almost always use terrible shared hosting plans that are completely inadequate for running this game. Another side effect of people inept at running a server is that they have a penchant for adding hundreds of mods negatively affecting performance, made by people who are also inept at making mods, creating a recipe for a really bad experience.

Official servers suffer from poor management and run on even cheaper shared hosting plan servers. Official server moderation can be heavy-handed and biased, leading to frustrating gameplay marred by hackers and poor server performance. It's not uncommon on official to wake up to your base missing because a moderator found it prudent to delete it because you were blocking a tier II Darfari archer spawn, and then to be stabbed by a Brazilian with stone daggers lag switching screaming "JAJAJA" as they teleport across the map. In contrast, our server offers a refreshing alternative, free from these common pitfalls.

Our Mission:

• To provide the best possible experience this game can offer performance-wise.
• To provide the best possible experience we can as admins by fostering free speech and a hands-off admin style when it comes to policing speech, but hands-on when it comes to assistance.

When we started the server, we made it a vanilla server with no mods. A few months later, we decided there was a lot that mods could offer the server in terms of playability because while this game is a very fun survival game, it totally lacks endgame content. As we were building a community with a lot of regular players, we wanted to see people have a reason to continue to stick around after they've done everything there is to do in Conan. So, we decided to add some mods to further that goal. However, we wanted to keep things very close to vanilla as well.

There are a lot of mods out there that add ridiculous, overpowering gear, or make the game way too easy, and we wanted to avoid that. If someone has a strong understanding of the game in vanilla, we wanted that to translate to our server and not force players to learn a substantial of new stuff or allow players well-established on our server to crush them with their overpowered weapons, extra levels, etc. Additionally, there are some really bad mods out there made by people who don't understand what they're doing. Anyone can download the devkit and upload a mod to the Steam Workshop; there are zero checks and balances for it, and most people installing them don't even understand what harm the mods are doing and just instead blame it on Funcom, which is an easy mistake to make under the circumstances. There are some mods/mod authors who should be avoided altogether.

Adding too many mods hurts performance and acts as a deterrent for people who are looking to test the server. If they just want to pop in to test the server, but there are 20GB worth of mods to download before doing so, most aren't going to bother. Furthermore, having mods, in general, is a deterrent for people to join. Funcom made it difficult to find modded servers on the server list, and they make it confusing on how to update your mods if there's a patch since the in-game mod updater doesn't function as intended. As a result, we would likely even have a higher population than we do currently if we had no mods, but we're doing quite well as far as player numbers go in spite of that. Still, these few carefully selected mods are worth it for what they bring to the table.

Our Mod List:

Amunet's Server Transfer - Travel between servers with the same character and your inventory at any time.
Pippi - A great deal of administrative tools; it does too much to explain.
ModControlPanel - Needed for Lesser Building Restrictions.
DungeonMasterTools Continued - Adds a ton of decorative content; everything that changes gameplay has been blocked out here.
Happy Little Trees - Adds awesome decorations.
Less Building Restrictions - Allows for a lot more creativity with fewer steps.
Amunet's Weather Changes - No rain indoors.
Barbarian Barber - Many additional hairstyles, highly requested, even though it is a bit on the heavier side.
Grim's Wonderbody Reupload - Much better-looking female body.
Aphrodite Water - Water blocks for creativity; a very small mod.
Juilla's Crabby Fashion - Another highly requested mod, adds many new decorative gears. It's a larger mod, but instead of installing many smaller mods, we settled on this one since it has a little something for everyone.
"Gothic" Building Set - Many of the building sets are way bigger than they need to be with 4k textures, etc. This is a relatively small one, and it adds a lot for its small size.
Tot! Sudo - Needed for other Tot! mods.
Tot! Custom - Much more character customization options.
Tot! Hud - A much better HUD for the game.
Tot! Admin - Someday it aims to replace Pippi, but it's quite not there yet, so we use both.

On Moderation

Once upon a time, some time ago, I was playing on some random private server with some random admin. I was having a bad experience. You see, back then, Shieldwrights used to be much more difficult to come by, and I managed to kill two by mistake as I found them. Once because I forgot to put my thrall on defend, and once I poked with my spear from horseback. Difficult, but my own fault. Then I went on to finally find one, knock it out, and as I was dragging it back to my base, it fell through the mesh. We've all had it happen before; sometimes logging out and in fixes it, sometimes it doesn't. In this case, it didn't. I politely asked the admin if he could help me out since I was having a hard time. He responded, "I don't help people on this server." I quit the game for several months.

If you have a problem here, we will help. This game has a lot of bugs, and they're frustrating. As part of our mission to make this server the best experience possible, we don't mind assisting you when something goes wrong; we're happy to because we understand what it's like.

However, if you don't like what someone has to say and you want me to silence them, I likely won't unless things are getting really out of hand. I have strong feelings about people having the right to express themselves however they want to, even if they're doing so to their own detriment because it will result in ostracization from their peers. If someone joins the server, blatantly shouting racial epithets over and over just for the sole purpose of trying to harm the server and everyone's enjoyment, I will do something about it. If someone's getting extremely personal with you and things are way out of hand, I may step in, but I only ban people in the most extreme of circumstances. I don't delete people's bases without warning, etc., unless they're inactive. In short, we're not here to get some sort of false sense of superiority; we just want to make an enjoyable experience for everyone in the game we all love.

There's been some people who have misconstrued (mostly on Reddit) my commitment to free speech to be somehow a dog whistle for people only on one side of the political spectrum. I find that strange, and kind of alarming. Until very recently, in the west, free speech was valued by everyone. So don't take it that way. We're accepting of everyone here, and have a diverse community of players. 

On Server Hardware:

Both of our Conan Exiles private servers run on Intel Core i9-10850Ks with 64GB DDR4 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD with 1Gbps ports and a total of 50TB bandwidth with DDoS protection. Because of this, we are the most powerful server cluster around.

This is more powerful server hardware than any other server, even the ERP ones that supposedly have 100's of people online at a time. When the game came out in 2018, this hardware may not have been needed, but in 2024, after years of updates, I'd say an i7 would be a minimum requirement, and that's for the base game alone.

This game uses SQLite3 for its databases, and that comes with some serious limitations performance-wise, foremost of which is single-core processing. While some of the other game processes can make use of multi-threading, the main function doesn't, and that means you need the most powerful Intel server you can afford for single-thread processing optimization. We've been very fortunate in that we have wonderful supporters that make this financially possible. It costs a lot for good servers.

On Multi-Servers:

In January, we added a second server thanks to the financial support of Inzara of Izalith. He's been a huge support to the server and a great member of our community. The second server features the Isle of Siptah map, and you can easily travel between maps in-game using the same character and taking your inventory with you. To my knowledge, everyone else that hosts a server cluster hosts them all on the same machine. This is suboptimal. We host both of our game servers on their own machine for enhanced performance. Additionally, we set up our own web server for server transfers which, while it's more difficult to set up, is a lot more efficient than the third-party site most other servers that have server transfers set up to handle the process use.

On Server Wipes:

We aim to never have server wipes, but because of how poorly this game manages its database, I can't say with 100% certainty that one will never happen. I had to perform a server wipe on the EL server towards the end of last December because of some corrupt data in the database that couldn't be resolved. It was affecting performance negatively, which to me was unacceptable. However, the benefit of having two servers linked together is that in the event a wipe is ever needed, you can simply relocate your belongings to the other server in preparation for a wipe and not lose any progress except your constructed base. That being said, I have no plans of ever wiping the server, and I actively maintain the database so that it can be prevented. I am optimistic in my ability to continue to perform maintenance in such a manner that the chances of ever having to have a wipe again are low, but not zero, and anyone who told you the chances of this ever happening on other servers are zero is lying.

As far as the server abruptly ending, that won't be happening either. We're the number one ranked non-RP server, and we've been around since September 2023, and we have no plans of stopping.

Server Features and Rules:

There is much custom content on this server and also some events that can be fully explored in the info section of this site, as well as the rules, which can also be reviewed on Discord.
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TL;DR:

Unless you're really, really, committed to roll playing, this is the server you want to play on.
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