PC Weird Connection Problem with Hosting (and possibly joining) Worlds Through Host & Play

[Wammyve]

So not long ago I got a new cable modem router to replace the rented one I had from my ISP. I've also been subscribed to a VPN service called Mozilla VPN (makers of FireFox) for a while as well (still am). Recently, I've noticed a weird issue with trying to host my worlds for others to join and play together on. Normally I would just host the world through Steam and people would join without any issues. However, I decided to test and see if hosting while connected to my VPN would work, and to my surprise it does! Sometimes it doesn't and I would usually try hosting again but with the opposite password settings (if I tried WITH a password, I would try again WITHOUT a password and vise versa), and that would usually then work. However, I never bothered to try and host without being connected to a VPN, and this is where the problem starts to arise.

For some reason, hosting with just my normal WiFi connection simply will not allow anyone to connect. What I've been told is that they get up to "Found Server", and then after some waiting it will say "Lost Connection". I would then just stop the game, turn on my VPN, start up the game, and it will let them finally join. However, using a VPN causes latency to go up, and my internet speed by default isn't that good to begin with. So I decided I would rather play games without a VPN for now until I get a faster speed plan. However like I said earlier, it refuses to let anyone join when not connected to my VPN. So I took to the internet and here is what I've done so far to troubleshoot this issue.

• Check Firewall settings and make sure Terraria and TerrariaServer are allowed on both Private and Public connections (public for VPN sake)
• Port Forward to 7777 on External & Internet Port under both TCP and UDP for my local IPv4 address.
• Verify Integrity of the game's files
• Make sure our game's up to date
• Make sure we're not using incompatible characters (Journey Char for Journey World & Classic+ Char for Classic+ World), tho we already knew this
• Checked my Modem Router's settings and whatnot (all seems fine but I could be wrong)
• Completely shutting down my VPN process in Task Manager

None of those seemed to have fixed it, however one thing does. If I simply reboot the modem router, all works well and the issue goes away entirely. However, the following day it immediately comes back again, and once again rebooting the modem router fixes it, rinse and repeat. However, I'm already starting to get tired of rebooting it over and over again just for Terraria (other games not tested but hosting my private Minecraft Java server works fine without needing to reboot the modem router).

I'm come to a few conclusions however. Either the issue occurs after I start up my VPN (though one day when I started up my PC I simply never connected to my VPN, but instead just let it start up and run in the background), or something happens to my modem router/internet connection overnight which causes it to mess up and require a reboot to get Terraria working. I don't think it's my PC since, before I switched modems, I never had this issue, or the game itself since again I've never had this issue before.

For anyone curious, my current (new) modem router is a NETGEAR AC1750 WiFi Cable Modem Router Model C6300. If anyone knows anything about modems, or simply opts to do bigger research on it than me (I've been looking at the user manual and checking the settings through the default gateway for a while now), feel free to give any input on it.

For now I will just reboot it whenever I play Terraria Multiplayer as a workaround.

 

[Wammyve]

Apparently I could join my friend just fine via Steam. Also, I decided to host a world via IP using TerrariaServer.exe and boom he could join me just fine. Idk whether or not it's my modem router or Steam being stupid (or both), or my internet just sucks . But yeah another workaround method (though I need to move Cloud worlds over to my Local saves to be able to boot them using TerrariaServer).