A router is a piece of networking equipment used to direct (route) packets to a final destination. When a packet arrives on the router, the router checks the packet's address against it's own routing table. If it finds the address in its table, it forwards the packet in the direction it's meant to go. If not, then it will either send the packet down the default port (usually port0 in-game), or it will drop and lose the packet.

Switches can be VERY useful in certain situations, but as your tower scales larger and larger and you get more providers and consumers you'll quickly find that switches begin to overload the entire network. The reason for this is due to the fact that switches don't actually route the information to a specific address, they send the packet along every port until it reaches its final destination, even if that direction is toward someone the packet isn't meant for.

As you can see here, assuming everyone is connected to a switch, if JOE wanted to contact EMMA, it would try to ping everyone (pictured in orange) on the path toward EMMA's endpoint, and each other client trying to contact someone else would be doing the same thing at the same time for their own endpoints.

This would result in it making over 12 or so hops

The consequence of this is that, if you have 50 people trying to communicate to each other, that's potentially 50 packets at a time pinging everyone simultaneously, when if you had a router it could direct each person's packet toward the final recipient, thus preventing wasted bandwidth on the rest of the network.

However, if we use a router, it would direct Joe's packet straight to Emma assuming that it's routing table is set up correctly, so where it would ping every single person in the previous diagram, it would instead go just about 4 hops to reach its final destination and avoid taking up everyone else's bandwidth as pictured

Setting up the routers in this game is a seemingly easy task, but it can prove a bit difficult as the scale of the network grows larger and larger, for this reason I will touch on both the basic setup of the router, but also how to use the RIP command to make setting your routers up easier in the late game.


First and foremost, the routing table works by

1. Checking a packet's destination address
2. Checking it's routing table for said address
3. Forwarding the packet along the port associated with that address

If we have a provider with the HWADDR 2025, and a router with the HWADDR 1010 and he was connected to Port 7 of the router, then we would enter the following command into the router using a debugger to add his address to the routing table

route add 2025 via port7 on 1010

This would mean that if any consumers attempt to access the provider who has the HWADDR 2025, it would be sent along port 7. Thus, rather than taking every possible path it could like on a switch it instead goes (more or less) directly to the provider. You still need to have a DNS server set up for consumers to access the provider HWADDR / NWADDR though! So...

The easiest way to set up your router so that consumers can still access the DNS (Domain Name Server) to find provider's HWADDR is to use the router's default port function. By default that's port0 on the router, but it can be modified to whatever port you want using

route default via port# on <router HWADDR>

where port# is the port's number. (port0, port1, port2, etc)

What this means is that, should a packet arrive on the router that doesn't have a specified address in the routing table, it will be sent along the default port instead of dropped. In our case, this means you can set your DNS up connected to a switch which is itself connected to port0 of a router, meaning that even without routing to a specific DNS that consumer's can still access the DNS

In brief, once you have more than one router and multiple providers it can get a little annoying. Simple things like consumer connections can be established rather simply, but for each router you need to update the routing information for all the providers on the new router to show it where to go to the NEXT router for accessing a provider. At first this isn't too bad, you COULD theoretically connect the new router's port 0 to the old router, but if you connect a provider to the second router you then need to both

1. Update THAT router's table toward that provider, and
2. Update the FIRST router's table to go to the SECOND router.

As you get a larger network and more routers this can get very, very annoying. The solution? The RIP command!

The easiest way to use the rip command is to, for each router that has a table of providers, run the following commands


rip advertise on <router HWADDR>
Which advertises that router's routing table to any other connected routers who are LISTENING, and allows them to automatically assign routes to the provider's on the advertising router's ports

rip listen on <router HWADDR>
This is the counterpart to the advertise command, this enables a router to LISTEN for the ADVERTISING router's routing table, and will then automatically set it. For example

If router 1 has a connection to 3035 on port7, and router 2 doesn't have a route set for address 3035, if router 1 is ADVERTISING, and router 2 is LISTENING, it will then route traffic for 3035 to whichever port it's connected to router 1 by. This means that you only need to set the providers connected to each route and not have to update their tables for every other router that's connected to that specific router.