Let your Discord start the game server, so nobody has to ask you

Every group that runs a game server has the same conversation, roughly weekly:

"is the server up?" "can someone start it" "@admin sorry to ping"

The server is fine. It is off, because leaving it running costs electricity and nobody wants to be the one asked to turn it on. The fix is not a better server — it is letting the people who want to play start it themselves, without giving them access to the machine.

What this actually is

Asbern controls game servers you already host. It does not host them. The bot needs to be able to reach the machine they run on, and from there it can start them, stop them, watch them and show you who is on.

That distinction matters before you read any further: if you do not have a machine running game servers, this feature is not for you and nothing else in the bot depends on it.

Step 1 — let it find them

/menu → More → Admin → Game Servers → Setup → Detect.

The console describes it as "Ask Docker what is running and name the games it knows", and that is exactly what it does. If your servers are Docker containers — which most modern Minecraft, Palworld and Valheim setups are — it will find them, work out what game each one is, and offer to adopt them.

Anything it does not recognise you can add by hand: a name, a game type, a port, and how to reach it.

Step 2 — decide who may press the button

This is the part worth thinking about for a minute.

• Everyone — anybody in the server can start a server that is down. Good for a friends' server.
• A role — "Members", or a role you hand out. Good for a public server where you do not want a drive-by starting a Palworld instance.
• Admins only — the button is there for you and nobody else.

⚠ Starting is not the same permission as stopping. People who can start a server generally should not be able to stop one out from under seven players, and the two are separate.

Step 3 — that is it

/menu → Gaming → Servers now lists them, with:

• Live status — up, down, or starting, checked rather than remembered.
• Player counts, and who is on, for the games that report it.
• A Start button on anything that is down, for whoever you allowed.
• Modpack links on the Minecraft ones, so a new player is not asking which version.

Shelving instead of deleting

When a server is finished with — the Valheim world nobody has touched since spring — shelve it rather than removing it. It disappears from the member-facing list and keeps its configuration, so bringing it back in six months is one press instead of an evening of remembering port numbers.

Which games work

Anything that speaks a standard query protocol, which is most of them:

• Minecraft — Java and Bedrock, including modded.
• Palworld, Valheim, ARK, Rust, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid and the rest of the Steam dedicated-server family.
• Anything else that answers a Source or Minecraft query — if it works with a server-list site, it works here.

For servers that support it, the bot can also send RCON commands, which is how "who is online" and the save-before-stop behaviour work.

The thing that changes

Not the technology — you had a game server before. What changes is that the server is on when people want to play, because the twelve-second gap between wanting to play and being able to is now a button instead of a message to someone who might be asleep.

The full setup reference is in the game server guide.