Swarm Evolution and Contribution¶
Swarm Evolution shows progress toward future community and managed capacity. The current service runs your game servers on hardware you control. Contribution is an optional way to declare spare capacity and track whether it qualifies for the community program.
Current Early Access phase
Contribution tracking and qualification are active. Other customers' game servers cannot currently be scheduled on contributed hardware. Contribution benefit access is also disabled in this phase. A progress meter or planned reward does not mean either capability is available.
Read the public meter¶
The public page shows verified hosts, reliable and available CPU capacity, available memory and disk space, network regions, and published milestones. Only verified physical capacity counts toward the Evolution meter. Declared resources alone do not qualify a host, and subscriber bonuses do not increase the meter.
The stages describe the service's direction:
- Larva: run games on your own hardware with the hosted control panel.
- Metamorphosis: a future qualified community capacity pool.
- Mature Swarm: future managed capacity alongside community and self-hosted hardware.
Use the stage and availability notices on the live page to see what is enabled. The later stages have no promised launch date.
Set or pause a contribution¶
- Connect a host using the installation guide.
- Open Contribution in the signed-in navigation.
- If your host has contribution controls, choose Set contribution limits. Enter CPU cores, memory in bytes, and disk space in bytes. Bandwidth in Mbps is optional. Choose limits you can support alongside your own applications.
- Choose Start contribution and review the host's qualification status.
- Use Edit allocation to change the limits or Pause contribution to stop contributing.
Only the host owner can change its contribution. A suspended contribution cannot be enabled until the suspension is resolved. If no controls appear, the page explains that allocations are available only when the program can accept that host.
These contribution limits are separate from the CPU and memory budget for your own Swarm Servers. Set that budget in Swarm Host resource allocation.
Understand Contribution Power¶
The signed-in page separates base points, subscriber bonuses, the current balance, and planned reward targets. Contribution Power reflects qualified, useful availability; it is separate from the public physical-capacity totals. Any plan multiplier applies to rewards rather than the Evolution meter.
During contribution tracking, eligibility can be measured while benefit access remains disabled. Do not treat a point balance or a planned target as active hosted compute, storage, or a subscription benefit. Check the page's current phase and benefit notices before relying on an unlock.
For ordinary self-hosting, use the User Guide. For backup copies and recovery among your own hosts, use Swarm Zones.