After installing ARK Survival Ascended on a Windows VPS, Windows Firewall must allow traffic to the ports used by your start batch file.
If the server starts but players cannot see or join it, closed firewall ports are one of the first things to check.
This example matches the basic start-asa.bat file from How to create a start batch file for an ARK Survival Ascended server.
In that guide the start file is saved in C:\ark-asa, and it uses game port 7777, query port 27015, and optional RCON port 27020.
- Connect to the Windows VPS.
- Open PowerShell as Administrator.
- Allow the ARK game port:
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "ARK ASA Game Port 7777 UDP" -Direction Inbound -Protocol UDP -LocalPort 7777 -Action Allow
- Allow the Steam query port:
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "ARK ASA Query Port 27015 UDP" -Direction Inbound -Protocol UDP -LocalPort 27015 -Action Allow
- If you enable RCON, allow the RCON port as TCP:
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "ARK ASA RCON Port 27020 TCP" -Direction Inbound -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 27020 -Action Allow
- Start or restart the ARK Survival Ascended server.
If your batch file uses different ports, open those ports instead. The firewall rule and the launch arguments must match, otherwise the server can start locally but still be unreachable from outside the VPS.
