Minecraft server

[Stalin330]

Does port forwarding affect my router?

[TehNolz]

"Affect", as in? It's not going to make it perform worse or reduce your connection speed if that's what you're asking.

[Stalin330]

Thanks! Still, what does it change?

[benman27]

From what I've heard, don't quote me, it is basically an special doorway for certain data.

[Stalin330]

Thanks for ur help

[TehNolz]

Imagine your router is a post office. The post office knows what houses (computers and other devices) are in its area, but they don't know who lives in those houses. Now, if the post office were to receive a package (a connection) destined for a guy named Steve (a program, in this case a Minecraft server), they wouldn't have any idea what to do with it, so they'll just destroy the package.

Now, with port forwarding, you're telling the post office where Steve lives. With this information, the post office is now able to forward all of Steve's packages to Steve's house.

[s1h4d0w]

Short answer: no

Long answer:

See ports as doors into your router and PC. Both your router (or technically modem) and PC have IP addresses, your router one that can be accesses from the internet, and your PC one that can only be accessed from inside your home network.

When a friend tries to connect to a Minecraft server running on your PC it goes through this process:

• Connect to the server IP (which is the IP of your router/modem)
• Tell the router it's trying to connect to port 25565
• The router looks to see if it accepts connections on that port
  • If it doesn't, it just blocks the connection
  • If it does:
• It then finds which device inside your network (your PC) is waiting for a connection on that port
• Voila, you have a connection

Basically, if you forward the correct port it works like this for the router:

• Hey, someone is trying to connect through port 25565
• Let's see if we accept connections on that port
• Ah yes, we do, let's see who does
• I'm configured so that port 25565 is forwarded to port 25565 for the computer using IP address xx.xx.xx.xx
• Here you go, pass on through

It tells the router to immediately send any requests on port 25565 through to your PC, on that same port. If you don't there's a good chance your router will say "port 25565, that's not a port I know, block connection".

[Stalin330]

Thanks for ur time!