Quite often the person with whom you want to play is located off of your internal network (LAN). If you want to host a room and play with them you will need to get your devices to communicate with each other. This guide will go over your options on how to do this so that you can play together.
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This guide will will try to explain things as clearly as possible, but make some assumptions about your environment and your familiarity with the operating system. Most notably, that you are familiar with the basic operations of your PC (how to download files, how to extract them, etc.)
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WARNING: These guides assume that you already have the necessary files (firmware, keys, games, etc.) to run the emulator. Neither the Eden Team nor Their Discord will assist you in obtaining these files. Asking for these files on the Discord may result in a ban from the server without support or chance to appeal.
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Difficulty Level: High
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Use this option if you want the greatest performance/lowest latency, don’t want to install any software, and have the ability to modify your networking equipment’s configuration (most notably - your router). Avoid this option if you cannot modify your router’s configuration or are uncomfortable with looking up things on your own.
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Port forwarding is a networking technique that directs incoming traffic arriving at a specific port on a router or firewall to a designated device and port inside a private local network. When an external client contacts the public IP address of the router on that port, the router rewrites the packet’s destination information (IP address and sometimes port number) and forwards it to the internal host that is listening on the corresponding service. This allows services such as web servers, game servers, or remote desktop sessions hosted behind NAT (Network Address Translation) to be reachable from the wider Internet despite the devices themselves having non‑routable private addresses.
The process works by creating a static mapping—often called a “port‑forward rule”—in the router’s configuration. The rule specifies three pieces of data: the external (public) port, the internal (private) IP address of the target machine, and the internal port on which that machine expects the traffic. When a packet arrives, the router checks its NAT table, matches the external port to a rule, and then translates the packet’s destination to the internal address before sending it onward. Responses from the internal host are similarly rewritten so they appear to come from the router’s public IP, completing the bidirectional communication loop. This mechanism enables seamless access to services inside a protected LAN without exposing the entire network.
For our purposes we would pick the port we want to expose (e.g. 24872) and we would access our router’s configuration and create a port-forward rule to send the traffic from an external connection to your local machine over our specified port (24872). The exact way to do so, varies greatly by router manufacturer - and sometimes require contacting your ISP to do so depending on your agreement. You can look up your router on *portforward.com* which may have instructions on how to do so for your specific equipment. If it is not there, you will have to use Google/ChatGPT to determine the steps for your equipment.