How To Open Ports in Your Router for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is an Arcade, Driving/Racing, and Action game published by Nintendo released in 2017.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe artwork featuring various Nintendo characters racing on Rainbow Road

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has the following styles of play.

Arcade games are short games that are made to be played for a short amount of time. Original arcade games were coin operated, but many arcade style games are PC and console.
Driving/racing games put you in the cockpit of a vehicle. The view can be either from inside the cockpit or from a chase camera. Examples include Mario Kart, Dirt, and Forza.

Forward Ports for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

When you are playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 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 on occasion 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.

Use a VPN Instead

Have you considered using a VPN instead of forwarding a port? For most users, a VPN is a much simpler and more secure choice than forwarding a port.

We use and recommend NordVPN because not only is it the fastest VPN, it includes a new feature called Meshnet that makes forwarding a port no longer necessary for most applications. With NordVPN Meshnet, you can connect to your devices from anywhere in the world, completely secure, over a highly encrypted VPN tunnel.

When shopping for a VPN, make sure that they meet the following criteria:

Your VPN provider should have a no-logs policy. This means that they do not keep any logs of any kind.
Make sure that your VPN provider has lots of exit nodes all around the world.
Check that your VPN will not affect your speed.
Verify that your VPN provider uses WireGuard as the underlying protocol.
Many people prefer a VPN provider that is not based in the United States.

This is the list of requirements that we used when we were shopping around for a VPN provider. There are lots of free, shady VPN providers out there that we looked at and dismissed.

Based in Panama, using diskless servers, and with over 6,100 servers in 61 countries, we can safely say that NordVPN satisfies all of these requirements.

Once you've set up your NordVPN account on multiple computers and enabled Meshnet, you can seamlessly access all of your devices as if they were on the same network. You don't even have to log in to your router. It's very simple.

Every time you click on one of our affiliate links, such as NordVPN, we get a little kickback for introducing you to the service. Think of us as your VPN wingman.

Before You Forward a Port

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

Your router's IP address.
Your gaming machine's IP address.
A list of TCP and UDP ports to forward.

How to locate your router's IP Address

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.

How To Forward Ports

Use our Network Utilities for a quick way to get your ports forwarded. Network utilities makes it easy to enable and disable your port forwards to keep your network security as tight as possible. You can also do it by hand by following these steps.

The general process for forwarding a port is:

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 proper box in your router.
Put the TCP and UDP ports for your game in the matching boxes in your router.
Frequently you have to reboot your router for the changes to take effect.

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