For a large 7 Days to Die community, I’d plan specs around your worst-case moments, not your average day. The biggest spike is usually horde night plus lots of players online plus a couple of big bases with traps firing. From my experience running a community server, CPU matters more than people think. I’d rather have fewer cores with higher clock performance than a ton of slow cores, because the server often bottlenecks on game simulation speed. RAM matters too, but it’s usually the “comfort buffer” that keeps things from falling apart when you add mods, big maps, or lots of active chunks.
Here’s the way I size it: I start with the map size and expected concurrent players, then I add headroom for mods and for people spreading out. If you’re running 30 to 60 players, I personally aim for a strong CPU, SSD storage (non-negotiable), and enough RAM that I’m not swapping when the world has been active for weeks. Also, make sure you can adjust view distance, max zombies, and chunk reset settings because those settings can reduce load more than people realize.
Come to think of it, the other “spec” that matters is administrative tooling, because good monitoring and restart scheduling can feel like a hardware upgrade.
