How Void Sluice gets players in without opening a port

Every wall in these guides has the same shape. NAT, CGNAT, double NAT, a firewall: they all block connections coming in that nobody asked for.

None of them block your server calling out. They can't. If outbound didn't work, nobody in your house could load a web page.

So we stopped trying to open a way in, and built a way out instead.

What you do

You run the agent on the same machine (or the same network) as your game server, tell it which ports your game already listens on, and link it to your account. The address shows up the moment the tunnel does. Paste it into Discord.

One agent covers every game on the box. Running Palworld and V Rising side by side is one tunnel, two addresses.

Right now the agent runs on Linux. Windows is next. It's early, and access is through early access while accounts open up.

What your players do

Nothing new. They type the address into the game. No VPN, no client, no "join my network first". As far as their game knows, your server lives at the relay.

That has a nice side effect: they connect to the relay's address, not your house's, so your home IP isn't handed out to everyone who joins.

The honest bits

There's an extra hop

Traffic goes player, relay, your server, instead of player, your server. That adds some ping, and how much depends on where the relay is. Pick the region nearest the people joining you.

What's encrypted, and what isn't

The tunnel between the relay and your server is WireGuard, so the leg that crosses the open internet to your house is encrypted. The hop from a player to the relay is ordinary game traffic, because the game client speaks the game and not WireGuard. That's true of every relay, and anybody selling you an encrypted hop from the player is selling you something.

We never hold your key

Your server generates its own WireGuard keypair and keeps the private half. We only ever see the public one. There's no key on our side to leak, lose or hand over, because it was never there.

It won't open everything

Only the game ports you list get published. The agent refuses admin and RCON ports outright, because a remote control for your server has no business on a public address.

The free tier has a daily limit

2 GB a day, resetting at midnight UTC, which is a comfortable evening for most games. When it runs out, your address stays yours, and games that support it show "Daily limit reached" in the server list instead of just going dark. More on that in pricing.

Compared to the other fixes

• Port forwarding is free and has no extra hop. Use it if you can. It needs your router to hold your public address, and a lot of routers don't.
• A VPN like Tailscale gets through anything, but every player installs it and joins your network.
• Renting a server works, costs monthly, and moves your world off your machine.
• A relay works through any of the walls, players install nothing, and your server stays where it is. The cost is the hop.