Open Ports on Your Router for Alien Swarm

Alien Swarm is a Tactical, Action, and Shooter game published by Valve released in 2010.

The required ports that need to be forwarded for Alien Swarm are as follows:

Alien Swarm - Steam

• TCP: 27015, 27036
• UDP: 27015, 27031-27036

We have guides that are custom tailored for Alien Swarm that will show you the specific ports.

• Alien Swarm - Steam

Alien Swarm includes the following styles of gameplay.

• Tactical games are a subgenre of strategy games that focus more on operational warfare, military style tactics, and troop placement. They focus more on logistics and production than on combat, and can at times feature complex battlefield tactics.
• Games that are considered action are all about centering the player in the middle of an evolving situation.
• Shooter games are fast paced action games that are based on testing the players reaction time. They usually involve the player holding a weapon in front of them and attempting to shoot other players or characters. Some shooters are short lived arcade style, but most have both a single player mission series and some have a large multiplayer following. Common shooters include Call of Duty and Battlefield.

When you are playing Alien Swarm you might need to forward some ports in your router. Forwarding ports is a useful trick in gaming because it can really help to make your network connection most stable and intermittently even faster. Routers were not designed to allow incoming network requests and some games can play tremendously better if an incoming connection is forwarded through the router to the game.

Before you can forward a port you need to know the following things:

• Your router's IP address.
• Your gaming machine's IP address.
• The TCP and UDP ports that need to be forwarded.

The easiest way to locate your router's IP address is to run our free Router Detector utility. It's a part of the Network Utilities suite of tools and it's completely free to use.

A smart way to forward your ports is to use Network Utilities. Since Network Utilities allows you to both forward and un-forward ports easily you can keep your network security maximized, and then forward ports only when you need them. Alternatively you can do it by hand.

The process for forwarding a port is generally:

• Start by logging in to your router.
• Locate your routers port forwarding section.
• Put the IP address of your computer or gaming console in the correct box in your router.
• Put the TCP and UDP ports for your game in the matching boxes in your router.
• Sometimes you have to reboot your router for the changes to take effect.

That's all it takes to open your ports. Want to learn how to create more port forwards? Check out our list of games and applications.