Cursed Walking Server Hosting: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse with Friends

A Cursed Walking server is a zombie apocalypse on modern Minecraft, where the dead walk by day and by night, climb on top of each other to get over your walls and arrive as a horde every ten days. The pack is built around survival, progression and exploration, and the author himself recommends playing it on a server if there are more than two of you. Here's what a Cursed Walking server needs, how much memory to get, how to install the pack on Elysium and how to prepare for the first hordes.

What Cursed Walking is

Cursed Walking is made by OnMod together with the LBS development team. The first version appeared on CurseForge in 2022, and the pack has since passed 8.7 million downloads. The author describes it as a fully featured, hand-curated zombie apocalypse for the newest versions of Minecraft, focused on exploration, progression and an ever-growing threat.

Here's what's inside, according to the CurseForge description:

• Weapons and armor. Plenty of guns from the Timeless and Classic mod and two of its addons, with armor and melee weapons from Marbled's Arsenal and Melees.
• Structures. Cities, bunkers, laboratories, ruins and more, all with custom loot tables, guns included.
• The Depths. An endgame dimension. To get there, find the map that leads you to the drill room and jump through the hole in the bedrock. Down below you'll find good loot, buildings and unique biomes.
• Custom creatures. The Depths are home to the Drone and the Feral, two powerful creatures with special attacks and mechanics.

How the apocalypse works: phases and hordes

The defining feature of Cursed Walking is that the threat grows over time. Zombies spawn at any time of day, can climb on top of each other and can infect you. The pack is split into phases: in later days more dangerous variants show up, such as runners and brutes. Every ten days the zombies gather into a horde and attack.

For a server the takeaway is simple: it's best to start together on day one. A player who joins a couple of in-game weeks later will be surviving with an empty inventory where everyone else has already settled in and the zombies have grown stronger. Building defenses for each horde is also easier as a team.

What a Cursed Walking server needs

CurseForge still hosts older Cursed Walking branches for 1.16.5, 1.18.2 and 1.19.2. They haven't been updated in a long time, and new content only lands in the 3.x branch on 1.20.1. To make sure your friends don't download the wrong pack by accident, send them the exact version name.

How much RAM you need and which plan to choose

The author notes that the pack is RAM-hungry and recommends giving the client at least 4 GB, preferably 6 GB, and up to 8 GB with shaders or a higher render distance. The server holds the world in memory for every player at once: cities full of loot, crowds of zombies and the chunks around each player. That's why for two or three people we recommend 8 GB, scaling up as your group grows.

Memory is only half the story. During a horde the server simulates dozens of zombies at once, and that load falls on a single fast core. Elysium runs Ryzen 9 7900X at up to 5.6 GHz with NVMe drives, and the data center is in Frankfurt, so the server is close to players across Europe. If you want to get more out of the hardware, take a look at the modded server optimization guide.

How to install Cursed Walking on Elysium

1. Open the order page and find Cursed Walking in the modpack list using search.
2. Pick a plan: the form suggests the minimum by memory and flags plans that are too small for the pack.
3. Pay for the order. The server downloads the pack from CurseForge and installs Forge on its own.
4. Start the server from your dashboard. The first start of a modded pack takes longer than usual; that's normal.
5. Ask your friends to install Cursed Walking through the CurseForge launcher, check that their pack version matches the server's and connect using the address shown in the panel.

If you already have a server, you can install Cursed Walking from the panel in the Modpacks tab. Keep in mind this is a clean install: all server files, including the world, are deleted. Be sure to make a backup first. If you're choosing hosting for a small group for the first time, it's also worth reading about a Minecraft server for friends.

Settings and tips for the server

• Cities are already on. The author says cities in Cursed Walking are enabled by default, and turning them on manually is unnecessary and even discouraged, because it can lead to chunk generation errors. Don't change the world type or generation settings to get cities.
• No Optifine. The author asks not to add Optifine to the 1.20.1 pack: shader and resource pack support is already built in. This applies to every player.
• Resource packs. A few core resource packs are force-enabled in the pack; optional ones are enabled by each player in the client settings. There's no need to add them to the server.
• view-distance — 6–8 chunks. Cities and underground structures are dense, and a long view distance loads the server noticeably.
• white-list=true — for a private game with friends, turn on the whitelist and add players with whitelist add <name>.

If one of your friends has a weak computer, the author mentions an approved lighter version, Cursed Walking - Lite Edition. But it's a separate pack: to play together, it has to be installed both on the server and for every player.

Common problems

A player's game freezes from time to time

The author answers this directly: random in-game freezes almost always mean the client doesn't have enough memory allocated. Have the player check the RAM setting in the launcher and raise it to 6 GB, or 8 GB with shaders.

Crashes with Optifine or Oculus

Optifine shouldn't be in Cursed Walking on 1.20.1. Remove it from the player's mods folder, and don't add mods that aren't in the pack and on the server.

Can't join the server

Check that the player doesn't have an old 1.16.5 or 1.19.2 branch but the same 3.x version as the server. The mod lists must match exactly.

The server won't start

Look at the console in the panel: Forge reports which mod caused the error. 1.20.1 needs Java 17; you can switch it in the Versions tab, and changing only the Java version doesn't touch the server files. Typical startup errors and what they mean are collected in the article on diagnosing server startup errors.

Backups and updates

Cursed Walking is under active development. The author's roadmap, which he marks as subject to change, includes world generation performance improvements and cave generation changes in version 3.4, a phase system overhaul, bosses in version 4, vehicles and a Depths overhaul in the 4.x series, and a complete city rework in version 5. Major updates may change world generation, so make a backup before every update.

Updating through the Modpacks tab is a clean install: save the world, install the new version and put the world folder back. An Elysium server makes an automatic backup every night, and there are 3 manual slots on Nexus, 4 on Vortex and 5 on Apex. A manual backup before day ten doesn't hurt either: if the horde wrecks your base, you can roll back.