When defending the Super Earth, several players will want to play solo, even though the game promotes a primarily co-op experience. The problem is, you can never truly play this game alone, even after changing your matchmaking settings to Friends Only. While this might work for players whose friends haven’t purchased the game or don’t have friends on Steam, it’s not an option for many. So here’s what you can do to set up a private lobby in Helldivers 2.

At the time of writing, you cannot set up or create a Private lobby in this game. This is because the only two Matchmaking Privacy options available are Public and Friends Only.

The problem with Friends Only is that strangely enough it is not limited to just your friends and also allows mutual friends to join your game. So even if your lobby is not set to public and you are playing with only a few other friends, the lobby will still be open for two more players. Now if a few of their friends come online and decide to join. The game will allow it even if it was your lobby/party. So currently there are these workarounds you can try:

Remember that the above solutions are just tricks to prevent your friends from joining you. So until the game releases the option to accept players into your party or a separate private lobby feature in matchmaking, you can't completely prevent them from joining your matches.