Open Tibia: The Forgotten Server or Canary?
Tibia · 17 September 2026 · 2 min read
One is the long-standing default, the other is where active development moved. What that means for a new server.
Open Tibia has run on The Forgotten Server for well over a decade. Canary is a more recent fork that has taken over much of the active development. Both are reasonable starting points, for different reasons.
The projects
| Project | Notes |
|---|---|
| The Forgotten Server | — |
| Canary | — |
| OTClient | Client, not a server |
The practical difference
The Forgotten Server has the largest body of existing scripts, maps and community knowledge. Almost any question you have has been answered against TFS somewhere, which matters more than it sounds when you are debugging a Lua error at two in the morning.
Canary carries newer protocol support and more recent engine work. If you want to run a server against a modern Tibia client rather than an older protocol, this is generally the shorter road.
The client question people forget
Many Open Tibia servers do not use the official client at all - they ship a custom OTClient build. That is a real decision, not a detail: it changes what players have to download, how much you can customise the interface, and how much trust you are asking a new player for.
If you are running a custom client, say so plainly on your listing. Players who have been in this scene a while will look for it anyway.
Before opening
Decide the ruleset before the engine. Whether PvP is enforced, what the rates are, and how much custom content exists will shape every technical decision after it - and they are the three things a player reads first.