Allright so here’s what I had to do.
In the installation directory there’s a server folder, in there are a bunch of batch(.bat) files which serve as launch presets for the server (co-op, deathmatch and team deathmatch). For online play the region probably needs to be configured, i’m playing local though so I didn’t need that.
The kicker is that you also have to port forward it to play (even if you’re playing locally), the ports that need to be forwarded are 7777-7781. Once they were correctly forwarded I was able to host a server and play the game with my friend.