How to create a Tibia OTServ on Windows with TFS: technical guide

Running your own OTServ is one of the most educational exercises for anyone who wants to understand game servers — you deal with the database, TCP sockets, Lua scripting and operating system administration all at once. The Forgotten Server (TFS) has been the most widely used engine in the Open Tibia scene since the mid-2010s, and the 1.x branch introduced a modern C++ codebase that makes maintenance significantly easier.

This guide walks through the complete path to get a TFS 1.5 instance running on Windows Server 2022, with MySQL configured, firewall ports open and the client connecting to the server. The persona here is the beginner or intermediate OTServ owner who prefers a Windows environment for its gentler learning curve — even if Linux offers performance advantages in the long run.

Estimated execution time: 45 to 60 minutes, accounting for binary downloads and the map files. The setup reuses precompiled builds distributed by the community, so there is no need to compile TFS from source.

Prerequisites

Before starting, confirm that you have administrative access to a Windows VPS with a dedicated public IP. OTServ does not work on environments with CGNAT or shared IPs because it needs to open inbound ports for the Tibia client to connect.

Preparing the Windows environment

Before downloading TFS, install the runtime dependencies that the precompiled binaries expect to find on the system. Without them, tfs.exe fails to start with cryptic messages about missing DLLs.

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe" -OutFile "$env:TEMP\vc_redist.x64.exe"
Start-Process -FilePath "$env:TEMP\vc_redist.x64.exe" -ArgumentList "/install","/quiet","/norestart" -Wait

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "C:\otserv" -Force
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "C:\otserv\backup" -Force

Installing MySQL for the database

TFS uses MySQL (or MariaDB) to store accounts, characters, houses and persistent world state. Without the database running, the server will not start.

CREATE DATABASE forgottenserver CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;
CREATE USER 'otserv'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'CHANGE_THIS_STRONG_PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON forgottenserver.* TO 'otserv'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Downloading and configuring TFS

With runtime and database ready, download the TFS build and import the initial schema.

C:\otserv\
  tfs.exe
  config.lua.dist
  schema.sql
  data\
  notes\

cd C:\otserv
mysql -u otserv -p forgottenserver < schema.sql

ip = "YOUR_PUBLIC_IP_HERE"
loginProtocolPort = 7171
gameProtocolPort = 7172
statusProtocolPort = 7171

mysqlHost = "127.0.0.1"
mysqlUser = "otserv"
mysqlPass = "CHANGE_THIS_STRONG_PASSWORD"
mysqlDatabase = "forgottenserver"
mysqlPort = 3306

serverName = "My OTServ"
ownerName = "Your Name"
worldType = "pvp"

Opening firewall ports

The Windows Firewall blocks inbound connections by default. You need to create explicit rules for the TFS ports.

New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "OTServ Login" -Direction Inbound -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 7171 -Action Allow
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "OTServ Game" -Direction Inbound -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 7172 -Action Allow

Get-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "OTServ*" | Select-Object DisplayName, Enabled, Direction

Starting the server and verifying

With everything configured, it is time to start TFS and validate that it works.

cd C:\otserv
.\tfs.exe

The Forgotten Server - Version 1.5
Loaded config.lua
Loaded items, monsters, NPCs, spells
Connected to MySQL
Loaded map
[OK] Server Online! - 127.0.0.1:7171

Verification

Confirm that the server is accepting external connections by running this from your local machine (not from the VPS):

telnet YOUR_PUBLIC_IP 7171

If the screen goes blank without an error message, the port is open and TFS is responding. Press Ctrl+] and type quit to exit.

To test with a real Tibia client, open OTClient or an adapted Tibia client, go to “Server” and set: IP = your VPS public IP, port = 7171. Create an account through an in-game command or directly via SQL and try to log in.

Troubleshooting

”Cannot connect to login server” on the client side

Most common cause: ip in config.lua is set to 127.0.0.1 or the wrong IP. Confirm the network interface IP with ipconfig and adjust. Then check whether port 7171 is really open using an external scanner such as nmap from a different machine.

TFS closes by itself when starting

Usually a missing or wrong Visual C++ Redistributable. Confirm that you installed the x64 2015-2022 package, not the x86 one. Another common cause: data/items/items.otb corrupted or from a different version than the configured protocol.

Lag or latency spikes with only a few players

It is almost always poorly optimized Lua scripts. Enable debug mode in config.lua (logFile = "logs/server.log") and audit global or event scripts firing SQL queries inside loops. On adequate hardware, TFS 1.5 comfortably sustains a few hundred players before saturating CPU.

Next steps

With the OTServ running, consider the following points to move the project forward:

• Set up automatic MySQL backups through Windows Task Scheduler (daily SQL dump export)
• Stand up a PHP site with login.php so modern Tibia clients can fetch server information (charlist API)
• Add external uptime monitoring to get notified if tfs.exe crashes
• Customize the map with Remere’s Map Editor or write your own Lua quests
• Migrate to the modern protocol (12.x) if you want current features from official Tibia

If you are taking the server into production with a real player base, a Hostini game VPS already ships with dedicated IPv4, DDoS protection specialized for game ports (7171/7172) and low latency to Brazil — which matters a lot when your players are based there.