How to Host TheHunter: Primal

This guide will go over how to do port forwarding for TheHunter Primal and what information you need in order to be able to host your own server.

Introduction

Hello! And welcome to my guide on portforwarding. I'm going to go over what information you need and how to setup your computer and router to port forward for TheHunter Primal so that you will be able to host your own server. Note this would also work for any other game, you would just need to change the port being opened.

Lets get started!

What You Need

There are several bits of infomation that you are going to need. To start out with you need the port numbers from the game. For TheHunter Primal the ports are 42303 and 27015 (seen on the start a server page in game).

Next you are going to need your IP address and the IP address of your router so you can access it. An IP address is just a number that identifies your computer on your network, cause after all these are computers they don't call themselves Bob and Larry, they identify who is who by a number.

If you are running a windows PC click on the start button > in the search/run bar type: cmd > select Command Prompt from the list. In the command window type: ipconfig /all







You might need to scroll up/down to the spot in the list that has the information you need as shown below.














Highlighted are the two pieces of information that you're going to need. The ipv4 addess is the address of your computer. The default gateway is the address of your router, take note of both of them.

Accessing the Router

Hey remember that default gateway number that you jotted down? Well now is the time to use it! Open your web browser and in the address bar at the very top type in that number. So for mine it would be 192.168.1.1 and hit enter.

This will take you to your router's web interface where you can login. If you don't know your login for the router you can always ask someone who does or google what the default username/password is for that brand of router that you have. Usually it is something really simple like Admin/Admin or Admin/Password etc...

Great now you're logged in! Now what? Well this is the part that I feel most people would get lost and this is also the part where most people's experiences will digress from each other as different routers have different menus and they don't alway use the same terminology for the same thing.

So instead of trying to list out how to do this for every possible router out there (yeah right!) I will direct you to this handy site instead.

http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

This site has a lot of different guides that show you with screenshots how to port forward on your specific model of router. So you just need to grab your router's make/model and find it on that site. On your router look for where the serial number is and it should list the model number. Or most of them will also display the make/model after you've logged into it in your web browser. After selecting the model of your router it will then come up with a whole host of games, if TheHunter Primal is in that list then fantastic! Click that. If not then pick any game as it does not matter, just change the port numbers to the numbers for the game you want not the numbers shown in their guide. They have a very comprehensive list of routers but not all of them, chances are they have yours however.

Follow their instructions on how to navigate to the port forwarding menu. Note when it asks for your private IP or local IP this is the 2nd number that you jotted down earlier (ipv4).

The general gist of this is that you are telling your router to allow traffic from a specific port (game traffic) to your computer (private address). Once that is all entered go ahead and save it and you can close out of that window.

Firewalls

So you took care of the hardware portion, now there is also a software component that might be blocking these ports as well. Your firewall could also be doing this. Again everyone's experience with this is going to be vastly different as there are many firewalls out there and they have different means to accomplish the same goal.

My advice is, google how to open ports for your specific firewall software and you should be able to find the information you need to do this.

I'll say the majority of people have their standard antivirus software and rely on Windows Firewall (included in your operating system) so don't forget to check the windows firewall as well.

Testing

Almost there!

Okay so you've forwarded your ports on your router, and allowed the traffic from those ports through your firewall. Now you need to test to make sure that it works. You can either just start up the game and create a server and see if anyone joins, which while it gets the job done it takes longer and isn't that conclusive.

Instead, I suggest installing this tool.

http://portforward.com/software/download-instructions/network-utilities/

DO NOT buy the software, unless you really want to for other reasons. But for our purposes here you can just use it for free so you don't need to buy it.

Once you got it installed go ahead and launch it and click on the Trial button > click on Port Checker. Now you're at a screen where you can type in the port numbers that the game uses and select either TCP or UDP and click the Check Me button. It will test if that port is open on your computer. If it comes up with a success message then congratulations you have forwarded the port succesfully!

If it comes up with a failure message then you probably missed something earlier. It would either be with your router and the port not being forwarded correctly or your firewall or other piece of software is still blocking it. Go back and double check to make sure everything is set correctly.

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

As stated everyone's experience with this is going to be a bit different depending on what hardware/software you have.

I will note that some ISPs provide you modems that also act as a router themselves (I have this with Comcast myself) so in addition to forwarding your ports on your router, you need to do the same thing on your modem.

Also don't get hung up on terms such as static IP vs DHCP. All that means is that your ipv4 address is either permanent (static) or it could possibly be changed (DHCP). For most people you won't need to worry about this as even if you are set to DHCP it will continue to assign you the same IP address as you likely don't have enough competing devices on your network in order to lose it. However if you find that you need to setup a static IP because your IP address is changing on you then this is easy enough to google on how to set that up.

If you went through and verified everything with your router and firewall and it is still not working, it would be worth a call to your ISP to find out if they have some kind of setup or something they need to change on their end to allow this traffic to go through.

Once you get this working the first time it becomes pretty simple, but if it is your first time doing this just have an open mind that this might take sometime to figure it out at first. This guide provides you the information tools to get it working, but some grease work is still required for your specific situation.

Anyways hope this helped you setup your own server so that you're able to play the game with others. Enjoy!

[$lug$]

[BRT Cobra]

my router is a lot more simple all i did was look for "games and aplications" and add these
the hunter primal
42303 to 42303 udp
8766 to 8766 udp

and for steam..
27030 to 27039 tcp
1200 to 1200 udp
27000 to 27015 udp
and ive hosted many games now (note i dont have to enter any ip in my cfg)
seems alot of people do it the hard way

[Yblehs Ymmot]

Thats exactly the conclusion i came to with Ragequit. It's also why i think a note on this important to include in some way. Maybe as a "If none of the above works" addition or similar.

[Deadman]

Interesting, never encountered a setup like that before. Guess it can be different for differnt countries.

[Yblehs Ymmot]

It wasn't true in my case mate. I researched my setup for two weeks and nothing, literally nothing helped. Until i called my ISP and got a Static IP instead of the Dynamic one i had. There is a reason why i'm very insistent on this being some kind of sidenote, it might not apply to everyone but it applies to everyone with an ISP using the same kind of setup as mine.

[Deadman]

Shelby, what your ISP is talking about doesn't apply in this case. The public IP that they give to your modem is irrelevent and not needed for this game. It can be set to anything since your not hosting a dedicated server. Your public IP can be anything and change and it won't effect your hosting ability one bit. The IP address we're using here are private addresses that the ISP has no control over.

[Yblehs Ymmot]

Great work btw!

[Yblehs Ymmot]

"Also don't get hung up on terms such as static IP vs DHCP..."

I spoke to my ISP as late as a week ago, i called live support, got in contact with a geek like me who have been hosting himself for many years - I asked him about several things and what he told me was:
1. This is wrong, to port forward/host server/open nat, you need a Static IP.
2. In the ISP's system there is something called a Static Dynamic IP which some ISP's use instead of the normal Dynamic IP. It's basically the same as a Dynamic IP (And some blabber i didn't understand)
3. "Making" or "Changing" to a "Static IP" by yourself won't make any difference unless your ISP allows this in their system, therefore some will have to pay for a static IP and some can make their own.
4. These are facts (Quoting him) and there is basically no workaround.
NB. I get my internet from one of the biggest danish ISP's.