A Straightforward Guide to Halo 5 Port Forwarding
Halo 5: Guardians is specific to the Xbox One. It is essentially a first-person shooter although the third-person viewpoint is used for some gameplay as well as cinematic sequences. Halo 5: Guardians can be played solo, but is very much designed with multiplayer games in mind. This means that it’s very advisable to have Halo 5 port forwarding enabled. Here’s how to do it.
Getting started with Halo 5 port forwarding
Port forwarding in general improves speed of response and minimizes issues such as lag and jitter. Halo 5: port forwarding specifically deals with some issues which can reduce your enjoyment of Halo 5: Guardians. These include:
- Drops in spectator mode
- Problems matchmaking
- Parties being disbanded
- FFA players missing from pre-game lobby
- Questionable voice quality
Things to know before you implement port forwarding
- Your router’s IP address
- Your gaming console’s IP address
- The ports that need to be forwarded
How to find your router’s IP address
- Press Windows+R
- Type cmd
- Either click OK or press Ctrl+Shift+Enter
- This will open a regular or admin command prompt
- Type ipconfig (no quotes)
- Look for Default Gateway; the IP address next to it is for your router
How to find your gaming console’s IP address
For the Xbox one press the Home button and choose Settings. Then go to Network>Network settings>Advanced settings>IP Settings.
Check the ports that need to be forwarded
Halo 5: Guardians uses the standard XBox Live ports. These are:
Protocol TCP: 53, 80 and 3074
Protocol UDP: 53, 88, 500, 3074, 3544 and 4500
Halo 5 port forwarding in simple steps
Each router will have its own specific approach to implementing Halo 5 port forwarding. You should have full details in your user manual. If you’ve lost your user manual, you should be able to get a new one on the internet. Alternatively, you can just try the following general approach and figure out how it works on your router.
- Log in to your router. Usually, you do this by opening a web browser and then either searching for your router’s IP address or entering a specific URL into the address bar (e.g. http://router.asus.com). Enter your login details.
- Find the port forwarding settings. If you don’t see them look for either advanced settings or WAN settings. Fill in the IP addresses and the port details.
- You will probably need to do this in two rounds, once for the TCP protocol and once for the UDP protocol. Remember that the port numbers are different for each protocol. If your router asks you to enter global ranges and a base host, enter the details in the following format:
Low range 53 High range 53 Base host 53
- For completeness, if you were entering a range of ports, the base host would be the same as the low range.
- Reboot your router.
