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Deploying a TES3MP server on a Linux VPS

May 2, 2023

Prelude

TES3MP is a fork of OpenMW, a drop-in engine replacement for TES: Morrowind.

In this page, I'll guide you through the process of setting up a dedicated TES3MP server on any VPS running a (hopefully any) Debian-based Linux distribution. I will be using Ubuntu 22.04, and we will set it up in such a way that it'll run as a systemd service.

Prerequisites

  • A VPS with at least 512mb of ram and around 1 gig of free drive space.
  • A debian-based distribution.
  • Patience. This should not take more than half an hour, but who knows.

The process

Begin by installing the dependencies for the TES3MP server. Then, create a folder we can work in, I'd suggest just calling it tes3mp.

sudo apt-get install luajit liblua5.1 libluajit-5.1
mkdir tes3mp
cd tes3mp

Then, proceed to grab the latest TES3MP server binaries (VR versions don't count).

As of the day of me writing this (May 2nd, 2023), 0.8.1 are the latest version, and we'd use the following commands to fetch them:

wget https://github.com/TES3MP/TES3MP/releases/download/tes3mp-0.8.1/tes3mp-server-GNU+Linux-x86_64-release-0.8.1-68954091c5-6da3fdea59.tar.gz

Once it's been downloaded, I'd suggest renaming it to something more friendly (perhaps tes3mp-server.tar.gz).

Now, we will be grabbing a bash script to do the initial set up for us. It'll unzip the files we just downloaded, create a new user (I'll call it tes3mp, but you can call it whatever you want), put everything in opt/TES3MP, and create a systemd service for the server.

In order, these 3 commands will: Download the bash script, make it executable, and run it as super user, providing the name of the server files, and a desired username for a dedicated user account.

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/markski1/c3d63ef32c9c07cbee6da2708f3406e5/raw/bc142e51295c5de6108faabcb7256039db98128e/ubuntu_tes3mp_deploy.sh
chmod +x ubuntu_tes3mp_deploy.sh
sudo ./ubuntu_tes3mp_deploy.sh tes3mp-server.tar.gz tes3mp

Next, you will want to open ports 25565 (yes, the minecraft port) for the game server, and 25561 for the master list. Assuming a standard Ubuntu server, simply do it with ufw.

sudo ufw allow 25565
sudo ufw allow 25561

Settings

Your server is now set up and ready to run.

Please refer to this steam guide by TES3MP's lead dev himself, explaining all the things you can and should set up.

Remember: Your server files are in 'opt/TES3MP'!

To start the server, use sudo systemctl start tes3mp