When you’re thinking about building a federated online world where anyone can host their own shard or server, one of the first questions is about infrastructure. How much power do you really need? How do you keep it affordable for small groups while still scalable for hundreds or even thousands of players? This is where the choice between Colyseus, Nakama, or a custom .NET approach becomes central. Each has its strengths, but the tradeoffs matter if your goal is decentralized, low-cost hosting. What follows is a grounded look at how Colyseus fits into that vision, how its community compares, and what sort of hardware makes sense at each scale.
Colyseus and Its Community
Colyseus is an open-source multiplayer framework built in Node.js that’s designed to handle real-time games with ease. It’s known for being lightweight and modular, and it integrates smoothly with engines like Godot, Unity, and Phaser. The development is active, and the project has maintained steady momentum thanks to both community support and professional sponsorship. You can find the main repository on GitHub under colyseus/colyseus, where updates, issue tracking, and release notes are all public.
There’s also a robust examples repository that showcases practical implementations. You’ll find sample projects for match-making, chat, turn-based games, and even basic MMORPG skeletons. These examples are excellent starting points for learning how Colyseus organizes rooms, manages state, and communicates with clients. The official documentation offers tutorials on building scalable room architectures and handling authentication, while the community page connects you to forums and Discord discussions where developers share tips and modules.
Existing SDKs and Integrations
For Godot users, there’s an open-source SDK maintained by the gsioteam. It’s MIT-licensed and compatible with Godot 4, which makes it a good fit for projects like Ultra Omnicosmic or any isometric world simulation. This SDK lets your Godot client connect via WebSockets to Colyseus rooms, synchronize state, and send commands with minimal code. While not as large a community as Unity’s, the Godot side is active enough that you can find examples, forks, and real projects to learn from.
Comparing Colyseus to Nakama
Nakama, built in Go, is a heavier platform. It’s feature-rich and more “enterprise-ready” with built-in support for accounts, leaderboards, match-making, and storage. That power comes at a cost: higher RAM usage and a larger baseline footprint. Nakama typically runs best with 2 GB or more of memory, and it performs comfortably on 4 GB or higher servers. This makes it excellent for studios that want to deploy a single, large backend—but not ideal if you want everyday users to spin up small, affordable shards of their own.
Colyseus, on the other hand, starts fast and runs lean. A single 1 vCPU / 2 GB VPS can comfortably host 30 to 50 concurrent players with moderate message rates, and even 80 to 100 if you apply interest management to limit unnecessary updates. Because it’s lightweight, it fits the decentralized dream: small groups, guilds, or friends can run their own worlds on budget hardware and still connect them through a shared federation. For a federated MMO, that accessibility matters more than any prebuilt feature set.
Why Not Just Strip ServUO?
ServUO, written in C#, is modular and familiar to anyone who has worked with Ultima Online shards. However, the architecture is heavy and intertwined. Trimming it down to something lean enough for modern, federated hosting is not practical. You would spend more time untangling the legacy systems than building your own lightweight framework. And since ServUO is GPL-licensed, you’d also face licensing restrictions if you wanted to release your project under more permissive terms.
It’s better to take inspiration from its modular design than to modify its code directly. You can still mirror the structure: an authoritative core server with pluggable modules for combat, skills, and AI, all written in TypeScript for Colyseus. That pattern keeps the good parts—modularity and scriptability—without inheriting the baggage of legacy architecture or restrictive licensing.
Hardware Recommendations and Scaling
One of the biggest advantages of going with Colyseus or a custom .NET stack is that you can scale horizontally. You don’t need a monolithic backend. Each node, or “world,” can serve a certain number of players and link to others via simple REST or WebSocket APIs. On Vultr or similar platforms, this translates directly into affordable hosting tiers.
Federated Hosting Tiers
| Concurrent Players | Recommended VM | Specs | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 – 200 | Regular Cloud Compute | 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM | $20 / month |
| 200 – 500 | Optimized Cloud Compute | 4 vCPU · 16 GB RAM | $120 / month |
| 500 – 1,000 | Optimized Cloud Compute | 8 vCPU · 32 GB RAM | $240 / month |
| 1,000+ | Horizontal Scaling | Multiple 4 vCPU / 16 GB nodes | ~$120 × N |
As a general rule, one CPU core can manage around 100 players if your interest management is efficient and you’re not broadcasting unnecessary data. One gigabyte of RAM typically supports 50 to 100 active users. At 500 players or above, it’s worth running your database separately—maybe a small 2 GB VPS for Postgres and Redis—to avoid performance dips during save operations. This layered design makes each server self-contained and cheap to maintain.
Performance at Each Scale
A single $10 per month VPS with 1 vCPU and 2 GB RAM can handle 30 to 50 active players without lag. A $20 per month plan doubles that comfortably. Once you hit 500 players, the $120 per month tier starts to shine—it can host multiple zones or rooms, each with 100 or more concurrent players. Past 1,000, you’ll want to shard horizontally. That’s when the “Federated Universe” concept really comes alive. Each shard can have its own culture, rule set, or even economy, while remaining part of the same interconnected universe.
The performance curve is linear and predictable. Adding a node doubles capacity. It’s simple economics and engineering: decentralized scaling that keeps power in the hands of players and creators, not a single central server.
When to Consider Nakama or SpacetimeDB
If your project demands integrated features like real-time analytics, leaderboards, and built-in account management, Nakama becomes more appealing. It handles those systems natively. But it also expects more resources, typically running best with 4 to 8 GB of RAM. For lightweight, self-hosted shards, Nakama is overkill. It’s great for studios but less ideal for a network of small, autonomous servers.
SpacetimeDB is an emerging alternative that blends a database with game server logic, letting you write in Rust or C#. It’s more like a “database as world” model. The idea is powerful, but its licensing and maturity level are still developing. If you like the idea of query-based subscriptions and database-level updates, you can emulate that in Colyseus with interest management. Clients can subscribe to logical regions or entities and receive only the data relevant to them—essentially achieving the same outcome on a simpler foundation.
The Sweet Spot for Federated Games
The true power of a federated MMO is in its accessibility. A world where anyone can spin up a server for $10 a month and instantly be part of a larger network of worlds is a post-scarcity vision of multiplayer gaming. It’s democratic and sustainable. Using Colyseus, you can make that dream practical today. Each shard can hold dozens or hundreds of players without breaking the bank. As communities grow, they simply add more nodes, each one independently owned yet universally connected.
Keep it simple. Build light. Use efficient interest management and modular server logic. Encourage players to host their own worlds. That’s how you create something that scales without monopolies, grows without gatekeepers, and endures because it’s distributed. Whether you’re building Ultra Omnicosmic or your own federated universe, the path forward is clear: start small, make it modular, and let the network grow organically.
