ABOUT Castaway.tf

Castaway.tf Team Fortress 2 Servers

Welcome to the steam group for Castaway.tf. We are a small community focused on playing vanilla TF2, in the spirit of old Valve servers.

Check out our website for a server list, the map rotation, and additional info: https://castaway.tf

The goal of Castaway is simple - servers where you can play Team Fortress 2 in it's prime. Random crits, sprays, no class limits, no moderation on player communication; this should be as close as possible to the vision of the game as seen by the original developers. Our servers feature a weapon reversion plugin, which puts weapons back into the state whenever they were most fun.

Castaway also features a map voting system. As we do not have all that many players, and it's not as simple as just joining a different server if you want to play a different map, the map voting is a compromise to allow players to play what they want.

No matter what someone else might tell you, we do not, have not, and will not have an official discord server.

Join the group chat for announcements for game sessions!

Check out this promo video one of our members made!

We now have an official YouTube channel for clips! Check the discussion thread for more information.

Add our servers to your favorites!:
or1.castaway.tf | Oregon #1 (USWest) - Weapon Reverts
va1.castaway.tf | Virginia #1 (USEast) - Weapon Reverts
194.195.210.23 | Atlanta (USEast) - Weapon Reverts
de1.castaway.tf | Germany #1 (EU) - Weapon Reverts
192.46.236.32 | Frankfurt (EU) - Weapon Reverts
172.233.246.87 | Paris (EU) - Weapon Reverts
45.79.118.151 | Syndey (AUS) - Weapon Reverts
sg1.castaway.tf | Singapore #1 (Asia) - Weapon Reverts
172.236.143.188 | Singapore #2 (Asia) - Weapon Reverts

Event Schedule

We have daily events in both NA and EU servers. The times are as follows, however the specific server may change and the time might be slightly different each day. As of writing this, the community currently favors playing on the weapon revert servers.

EU
Monday-Friday - 7 PM GMT / 9 PM GMT+2
Saturday-Sunday - 4 PM GMT / 6 PM GMT+2

NA
Monday-Sunday - 5 PM PST / 7 PM CST / 8 PM EST

Asia
Monday-Sunday - 7 PM UTC+8

These events are announced in the group chat when they start.

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POPULAR DISCUSSIONS

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

New Servers, New Provider

27 January - random | 3 Comments

Hello, over January I have spun up a series of new servers. These new servers have better hardware and the occasional lag spikes should be gone.

The new servers are:
Oregon #1 - or1.castaway.tf
Virginia #1 - va1.castaway.tf
Germany #1 - de1.castaway.tf
Singapore #1 - sg1.castaway.tf

You can use these to connect with in console. Domain names work the same as IP addresses as far as the game is concerned, so you can use the connect command in console to join on the IP, and you can even use the domain name when adding a server to your favorites via IP. They're easier to remember and to type out, and they'll all use this scheme going forward. I did not set up DNS records for existing old servers, I'm only going to do it for the new ones.

The purpose behind this is because our existing provider, Linode, has cheap servers but they're only 1 core, causing the CPU to get overloaded. The new provider, Hetzner, has the same price (or cheaper) and double or more the amount of resources. Overall, you should not see any of the lag spikes anymore (other than at 5am, when the demo uploading happens).

Note that Hetzner only has 6 locations. Two in Germany, one in Finland, two in America, and one in Singapore. Because of this, I can't spin up servers in any other region on the new provider. If you really want one somewhere else, it'll be on the old provider and will suffer from lag spikes occasionally. Australia is such an example, as Hetzner does not have any data centers on the continent. Luckily for Aussies, at least Singapore isn't too far away.

Over time I want to spin down the old servers and have these numbered ones be our only ones left (other than australia). I know some people have attachment to the existing servers, especially Atlanta, but I think it's for the best to migrate to the new servers, both for performance and for scalability.

SourceTV and server changes

13 December, 2024 - random | 4 Comments

I have made a few changes over the past few days and would like to catalog them here.

SourceTV Demos

I have enabled SourceTV auto recording on all servers. What that means is that a demo file will be automatically recorded for every match, from this day going forward, and will be publicly available for download. Thanks to Eric Zhang for pushing me to implement it and helping with the cvars.

The goal was to boost the community's ability to create clips, though you can use it to save your favorite games.

The archive can be found here[mega.nz], and it is also available on the website. Demo files are uploaded to the mega at 5 am local time for the server. The demo uploading process, specifically the compression aspect, takes up a ton of CPU and lags the server.

Replays are stored in the archive like so:

ServerLocation-ServerIP └──Year └──Month └──Day └──HourMinute-Map.zst

Where Year/Month/Day are the date when the match occurred, and HourMinute are the start time of the match.

Demo files are large, especially when recording 66 ticks per second and 45 minutes of gameplay. In order to save space in the long run, I have compressed all demo files using zstd[en.wikipedia.org]. To extract the files, you will need a tool capable of decompressing zstd. You can view the github[github.com] for the zstd tool and download it from the latest release. For windows users, it will be zstd-v1.X.X-win64.zip (v1.5.6 as of writing this) and for Linux users, you can get zstd with your package manager. I apologize for not putting it in a more common format, but as I said these files are decently sized so every percent saved matters in the long run.

For assistance regarding editing demo files, you can view this thread by castaway member ejv2 for a guideline on how to use the replay editor with demo files.

Singapore server

I have spun up a Singapore server, our first server in Asia. Singapore was chosen just based on feedback from some of our members in Asia. As per below, it is also a weapon revert server.

No more Vanilla

I made an executive decision and converted all remaining Vanilla servers to weapon revert ones.

Let's be honest, at this point a regular vanilla server isn't enough of a draw for a consistent playerbase. The overwhelming majority of our community wants to play weapon reverts instead of modern balance, and it's reflected in player counts. Therefore, I have converted Newark, Dallas, and Frankfurt to weapon revert servers. This has the added benefit of giving people an overflow server if the main one is full, as before there was only 1 revert server per big region. More servers can be added for AUS/Asia if the demand exists and there's consistent server fills.