How do I port-forward?

[cvxdf]

I'm a bit confused since the master and caves are different servers, and since each one of them has a port, and one master port, I'm confused which one I have to port forward.

Do I only need to do the master port? Or do I need to include the 2 shard ports?

This is all done on one machine by the way.

This is what I currently have, with 10889 being the master port listed in cluster.ini

Also, one more interesting thing. Do you even need to port forward for a server to be publicly available? Because first run I forgot to save the custom port forward service, but my friends were able to join. 

[Daniel86268]

Since the DST server connects to the Klei Server lists, and players connect over those, in my xp DST servers work just fine without port forwarding.

Sometimes there's the issue that the server list shows ??? as ping, which is the main reason why server hosts implement port forwarding for DST servers. (This doesn't affect gameplay, but the players who want to join don't see the latency in the server browser.)

If you want to portforward, you only need to port forward the two shard ports, as the master port is used for communication between the servers.

Players connect to the overworld shard port, and, if they are in the caves, or enter the caves, get handed over to the caves shard, and then go over that port. (By that logic you technicially only need to forward the overworld shard port, but I'd do both at the same time. Might as well.)

[cvxdf]

5 minutes ago, Daniel86268 said:

Since the DST server connects to the Klei Server lists, and players connect over those, in my xp DST servers work just fine without port forwarding.

Sometimes there's the issue that the server list shows ??? as ping, which is the main reason why server hosts implement port forwarding for DST servers. (This doesn't affect gameplay, but the players who want to join don't see the latency in the server browser.)

If you want to portforward, you only need to port forward the two shard ports, as the master port is used for communication between the servers.

Players connect to the overworld shard port, and, if they are in the caves, or enter the caves, get handed over to the caves shard, and then go over that port. (By that logic you technicially only need to forward the overworld shard port, but I'd do both at the same time. Might as well.)

Thanks for the reply, I'm not too experienced in networking. So just to confirm, would I have two separate services with one of the services having global port range and base host port filled with the overworld port, and the other service filled with the caves port?

[Daniel86268]

23 minutes ago, IAmV0id said:

I have two separate services with one of the services having global port range and base host port filled with the overworld port, and the other service filled with the caves port

Yes.

Sometimes you can do port ranges with automatic mapping and stuff, but this is usually the way to go.