“What even is Xonotic?”

Xonotic is a really fun free and open source first person shooter. Imagine Quake or Unreal Tournament and crank that to 11!

I am just a game server maintainer, and I have no ties to the Xonotic Team beyond that. A lot of love to them for making this game :D

This article is almost completely about my server and hosting it.

(image credits to xonotic.org, taken from https://xonotic.org/images/)

It allows you to selfhost servers, hop around endlessly and have a lot of fun with friends. Chances are that if you like Quake/Unreal Tournament, you’d want to play Xonotic at your next LAN party or weekend session.

Quick Video Demo of the game for context:

“Okay cool, what’s this Xonotic India you’ve built?”

I run the only consistently server for Xonotic, running since 2023 with minimal downtime. It’s not perfect but I care about it a lot.

“That sounds really cool, why have I never heard of this?”

Well, chances are you might have. I discovered Nexuiz(its predecessor) when idly staring at a linux GUI package manager store app, and scrolling through the games section.

I also gave a talk about it a while ago at a FOSSUnited meet in the January of this year: https://fossunited.org/c/bengaluru/jan-2025/cfp/a0cdo1e0s5

For more info about this, check out my slides from back then: https://souhrud-xonotic-india-presentation-jan2026.pages.dev/

The current setup

All of this kinda runs on oracle free tier. I often joke with my friends about how I’ve sold my soul to Larry Ellison to run this, but I didn’t know the true effect of this up until today.

Oracle Cloud Free Tier reduced its ARM Ampere A1 from 4 OCPU + 24GB RAM capacity to 2 OCPU + 12GB RAM.

This was completely fine for me, as that just means deleting a VPS I made for my final year project(which is completed and wrapped up) and resizing the remaining server to fit within the limits.

There, I found out that I couldn’t scale the machine shape up or down because the INSTANCE WAS DISABLED!!!

sigh If any of you reading this have an oracle engineer in your basement (in case support fails), please consider helping me raise a support request. For personal reasons, I do not wish to upgrade my account/OCI tenancy to PAYG.

If I don’t get a solution to this soon, I’ll have to resort to that one vibeslop github guide that does some freaky stuff to get to support, you know the one.

The “Oh I didn’t know Oracle Cloud could do that” part/“Blud, just host it yourself”

Yes, cloud owners can do that. Why? I have atleast 4-5 theories, and two revolve around “AI” compute. Anyways, that doesn’t really matter here.

Hosting it myself in my home leads to some major holes and risks for me, like:

1. I need to buy access to a static IP from my ISP. This is a cost, I hate extra costs.
2. The static IP above is a risk because now I don’t get a fresh IP every time I turn my router off for a while. With a rotating IP, I can get around online bans(most of the time unfair blanket IP bans) and more. While I’ve never used it, it’s a pretty sweet thing to have.
3. With the static IP above and port forwarding, I need to worry about the security of my home’s network connected devices. If a bad actor compromises my VPS, all they have to gain is my loss of a cool game server that I’m not paying for out of my pocket. If a bad actor instead compromises my home server, they can exploit further holes(since I’m not very good at networking) that got them there to compromise other devices on my home network. This is not something I want on my hands.
4. The security above, and maintaining a homelab for others means I need to guarantee a certain level of reliability. This is a strain on me on multiple fronts, which includes server costs, cognitive overhead of dealing with my own infra and most importantly, the electricity bill. I can run servers for myself for free of cost, I can run servers for others at a cost. I can’t run servers for others for free, not when it costs me money. I like free.
5. Mentioning this again but ELECTRICITY BILLS!

Wrapping Up.

What does this mean for the future of Xonotic India? I don’t know. Rest assured that I’m trying my best and will answer any questions you may have.

I realized that… more than negligence, this happened because I am a very passive dev and handle problems in a very reactionary manner, which works well when I have motivated folks around me who can pick up my slack and vice versa when I’m doing well. I also like to fire-and-forget my projects which means my personal shenanigans suffer a lot.

The consequences of this is that people can sense when the dev doesn’t intend to proactively improve their work. It’s one thing if they fork it with more features(which is greatly encouraged, same with PRs, I will do my very best with what you send my way) but usually the result is nothing. Radio silence.

If I would’ve checked my emails or even actively maintained my server, I would’ve caught this and we would’ve been fragging by now.

Thank you for reading this blog post. It’s a bit personal to me because I’ve been running from this habit for a while, and needed a kick in the shins like this to realize it. Will I change, or still go on with my life without acting on this revelation? Find out on the next episode of Dragon Ball Z!