Australian RedM servers

The Australian landscape

RedM is small next to FiveM, and the Australian slice of it is small again. The bulk of the server list is North America and Europe, with a long tail of everywhere else. Australian hosted servers exist, they come and go, and none of them is large by the standards of the big American communities.

That has three consequences worth knowing before you start looking:

• You will be tempted overseas. The busiest, most polished servers you read about are almost all hosted a long way from here, and they are busy at the wrong end of your day.
• Region tags lie. The client's server list does not reliably tell you where a box is, and a server calling itself AU may be renting in Los Angeles because it was cheaper. Check rather than assume.
• Small is not the same as bad. A server with thirty people on at 8 pm Sydney time is a better evening than one with a hundred and twenty who are all asleep when you log in.

New Zealand and South East Asia get most of the benefit of an Australian host too, which is worth remembering if you are reading this from either.

What distance actually costs you

Latency is the largest single difference between a good and a bad RedM experience from this country, and it is usually explained badly. It is not about a number in the corner of the screen looking untidy. It is about what the server decides and how long you wait to hear it.

A RedM server is authoritative for most of what a roleplay server does. Opening a shop, picking something up, being hit in a gunfight, a horse answering a prompt: each one is a message out and a message back. At 40 milliseconds that loop is invisible. At 280 the world answers about half a second late, every time, and it stacks up in specific ways:

• Prompts and menus feel sticky, because each one waits on a round trip.
• Gunfights get unfair in both directions. You are shot behind cover, and your own shots land late.
• Horses and carts feel heavier, because the server's correction arrives after you have already committed to the turn.
• Anything timed is harder for you than for a local player, because the window closes on server time. A skill check with a real window is a genuine handicap at distance.
• Jitter and packet loss hurt more than the raw figure does, and long international routes carry more of both. A steady 200 is more playable than a 140 that spikes.

That last point is the one most people never test, and it is the one that ruins evenings.

Rough numbers, and how to check your own

The figures below are approximate ranges for a typical residential connection on the Australian east coast. They are a sanity check and nothing more. Your ISP, your route and the hour of the day all move them, so treat this as an order of magnitude and then measure the server you care about.

How to measure before you apply

1. Ask in the server's Discord where the box is hosted. City, not country. United States covers sixty milliseconds of spread on its own.
2. If they publish a connect address, run ping against the host from a command prompt and watch it for a minute, not for two packets. Look at the spread as much as the average.
3. Join once and read the ping in the server's own player list or HUD, during their prime time rather than at three in the morning their time.
4. Then have a gunfight or attempt a timed skill check. That is the test that actually tells you, and it takes ten minutes.

Time zone matters as much as milliseconds

This is the part people underweight. A server in Chicago with a large American population has its busiest hours in the middle of the Australian working day. You can have a perfect connection to a city where everybody is asleep.

Roleplay needs other people in the same place at the same time. A server whose evening is your evening is worth more than a small improvement in ping, and the useful question is not only where it is hosted. It is how many people are on at 8 pm Sydney time on a Wednesday.

An Australian host usually answers both questions at once, which is the real argument for local hosting. The box is close, and so are the people on it. The staff are also awake when you are, which matters the night something goes wrong and there is nobody to report it to for nine hours.

Where Australian servers are listed

There is no reliable directory of Australian RedM servers, which is most of why this page exists. In practice they turn up in four places:

• The client's own server list. Searchable, shows player counts, and unreliable about location. Start here, verify elsewhere.
• Discord directories. Most RedM communities live in Discord first and list themselves there. Searching for RedM alongside Australia or AU finds communities the game's list buries.
• The Cfx.re forums. Owners advertise there, and the old threads are useful in a way the new ones are not: they show you which communities lasted.
• Word of mouth. Slow, and still the best filter, because the person answering has actually played there.

Whichever route you take, run the checks below before you apply. A server appearing high on a list means it paid attention to that list, and nothing else.

How to judge a server before you commit

Applying to an allowlisted server, writing a character and learning its systems is several hours before you play properly. Spend twenty minutes on these first.

Check these, in this order

• Where it is hosted, by city. Then measure it, as above.
• Players on during your evening. Look at the list or the Discord between 7 and 10 pm your time, on a weeknight and again on a weekend.
• How old the Discord is, and how busy. Read the announcements and changelog channels. Substantive changelogs weekly for six months is a very different proposition to a burst at launch and silence since.
• Whether the rules are written down and specific. Vague rules mean arbitrary moderation. Look for defined terms on the usual friction points: value of life, powergaming, metagaming, the new life rule, combat logging, and what limits there are on robbery and kidnapping.
• The wipe policy. Ask directly whether they have wiped and whether they intend to. A progression server that wipes without warning costs you months.
• How money enters and leaves the economy. The best single predictor of whether a server is still fun in three months. If every job pays out of thin air and nothing removes money, prices inflate and the next new player is locked out. Real sinks, finite stock and player driven supply hold value longer.
• What is behind a paywall. Cosmetics pay for the box and that is fine. Priority queue is a grey area. Selling currency, stats or exclusive weapons and horses changes the game you are joining.
• Staff conduct in public. Read a week of the support and appeals channels if they are visible. You are choosing the people who will decide your disputes.
• Whether the application asks anything real. An application that takes ten seconds filters nobody, which tells you what the population will be like.

Warning signs

• No stated host location, or evasiveness when asked.
• A player count that looks inflated next to how quiet the Discord is.
• Rules that amount to one paragraph, or to the phrase "use common sense".
• A store selling in game money, or unique horses and weapons.
• Unscheduled restarts and rollbacks mentioned casually in general chat.
• A launch two weeks ago and a promise of an enormous feature list. Ambition is cheap. Shipping is not.

Frameworks, and why the name tells you little

A framework is the shared code a server is built on: how characters save, how money works, how inventory is stored, how jobs are defined. Servers advertise these names, so it helps to know them, but the honest summary is that the framework tells you about the developers and not about the evening you will have.

Better questions than "what framework do you run"

• Does progress save reliably, and what happens to my character if the server falls over mid session?
• Is the inventory positional or a list, and does space or weight actually constrain what I carry?
• Are skill checks real interactions, or a progress bar with a timer?
• Is shop stock finite, and does what players sell go back on the shelf?
• How much of the server was written for this server rather than bought?

Those five answers tell you more about a Wednesday night than any framework name does.

Our own answers, for what they are worth

This page is published by the people building The Pub, an Australian RedM server. That is a conflict of interest and you should read it with that in mind. The checklist above is written to be used against any server including ours, and several of its questions are ones we would rather not be asked.

Since a checklist is more useful with a worked example, here is how one server answers it. Ask the same questions everywhere else.

None of that makes it the right server for you. A grind to level one hundred and an inventory with corners are exactly what some people want and exactly what others will bounce off. The point of publishing the answers is that you can demand the same specificity from anybody else.

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