How to Port Forward Splatoon 2 in Your Router

Splatoon 2 is a Third-Person, Shooter, Action, and Strategy game published by Nintendo released in 2017.

Splatoon 2 artwork showing Inklings and Octolings in a match

Splatoon 2 has the following styles of play.

Third person games have the game camera behind the players shoulder. You generally see the main characters back, shoulders, and head. Popular games that are in the 3rd person are Tomb Raider, Assassins Creed, and Gears of War.
In a shooter the player must have a very fast reaction time. Usually there is a weapon held out in front of the player that is used to target other players or enemies. They can be either single player or multiplayer. The single player versions usually have a short storyline with minor RPG elements. Call of Duty and Battlefield are some very popular examples.
Games that are considered action are all about centering the player in the middle of an evolving situation.
Strategy games tend to focus on planning and skillful thinking in order to beat either real players or bots. They can be either real-time in which the play clock ticks continuously or turn-based where each player has a dedicated turn to finish their action. It is not uncommon to include exploration and resource management.

How to Port Forward Splatoon 2

When you are playing Splatoon 2 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 sometimes 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 router.
Your gaming machine's IP address.
The TCP and UDP ports that need to be forwarded.

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

The easiest way to do this is to use Network Utilities. Network Utilities can forward your ports in just a few clicks, and close them back down when you are done just as easily. You can also do it the manual way.

The process for forwarding a port is usually:

Login 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.
On occasion you have to reboot your router for the changes to take effect.

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