Forward Ports on Your Router for Portal

Portal is a First-Person, Puzzle, Platformer, and Adventure game published by Valve Corporation, Microsoft Game Studios released in 2007.

Portal has the following styles of play.

First person games are played from the perspective of the player. They typically have a gun or other weapon held out in front, but this is not always the case. Many first person games are sometimes called "shooters" because the primary goal of the game is to shoot other players or creatures, but this is not always the case.
Puzzle games require players to solve a variety of puzzles ranging from logic to patterns to words and numbers. They are sometimes timed and sometimes do not have a time limit. Some puzzle games have a level progression built in to them and others are more in the arcade style.
Platform games, also known as platformers, have the player jumping from platform to platform, sometime performing some sort of acrobatic stunt. Common examples include Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog.
An adventure game is where the player is usually the protagonist and plays through an evolving story. The storyline is the driving part of an adventure game.

Port Forward Portal

When you are playing Portal 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.

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:

The IP address of your network router.
Your gaming machine's IP address.
The TCP and UDP ports to forward.

How to locate your router's IP Address

The easiest way to find 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

Most people use our Network Utilities software package to forward ports. It's the easiest way to forward ports when you need them and then close them when you do not. You can also do it by hand.

The process for forwarding a port is usually:

Open a web browser and navigate to your router's IP address.
Find your routers port forwarding section.
Put the IP address of your computer or gaming console in the applicable 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.

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