Alchemy Factory Multiplayer & Dedicated Server Guide
Hosting a co-op game
The official FAQ answer, unchanged since December 2025: “The host should enable Multiplayer when starting a new game or loading a save. In game, press ESC to open the menu and invite Steam online friends. Alternatively, friends can right click the host in their Steam friends list and select ‘Join Game’ (requires the host to have multiplayer enabled).”
Steam lists the game as Multi-player, Co-op, Online Co-op and LAN Co-op. Multiplayer stability for very large saves was one of the demo-to-Early Access improvements listed on 11 December 2025.
What 1.0 added
From the 1.0 patch notes, all marked experimental:
- A Multiplayer Lobby in the main menu that lists public servers hosted by other players.
- A join code generated when you create a multiplayer game, so people who are not on your friends list can connect directly.
- A Dedicated Server, with setup instructions in “the relevant guide” (a Steam community guide the notes reference but do not link). The server build is a separate Steam app, 4550060, which one player found and ran in August 2026 before there were client instructions for it.
- Hotfix 1.0.4917 improved the Join Game UI.
In-game chat and host commands
Added in v0.5.4530 (26 June 2026). Press Enter to chat. Commands:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/help | list commands |
/setadmin <password> | set the admin password (host only) |
/admin <password> | become an admin |
/list | show online players |
/kick <player id> | kick a player (host or admins) |
The Enter key opening chat is also why one left-handed player could not rebind E to Enter for interactions.
Known multiplayer problems at launch
- Cannot connect at all. Two launch-day threads report neither invite nor join code working for a pair of players with the firewall open. No developer reply yet.
- Single-player refuses to start when another dedicated server is running. One player traced a pre-menu crash to the game trying to bring up its own server code on port 27015 while a Palworld server already used it. Stop the other server before launching, or change its port.
- Clients could not pick items off belts and could not revert a Transmuter transformation; the second was fixed in 1.0.
- Catapult launches during a shrunken transformation could stop a client rejoining (August 2026 report).
- Hotbar build options vanishing for a rejoining client was fixed in v0.4.3.4131.
Player cap and crossplay
No maximum player count has been published anywhere in the announcements, the FAQ or developer replies. The /list and /kick commands imply hosts expect more than one guest. There is no crossplay because there is no second platform; see platforms.
Sources: Alchemy Factory FAQ (13 December 2025), question 6; 1.0 Patch Notes and Hotfix 1.0.4917 (8 September 2026); v0.5.4530 notes (26 June 2026); v0.4.3.4131 notes (6 March 2026); Steam Discussions “Multiplayer not working” (two threads, 8 September 2026), “Cannot run game, dedicated server conflict on SINGLE PLAYER” (8 September 2026), “dedicated server there but not usable?” (16 August 2026).
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