• August 24, 2025: Initial guide release!
  
• September 6, 2025: Included a screenshot in the "Example of a Network Router" section to better showcase the setup for a specific network.

The following represents some primary assumptions that I use in my networks. They are a little fluid depending on the situation but for the most part, they are followed whenever I add new floors.

• Critical services that are required across the entire network are hosted within the datacenter
  
  • This does not mean that I only put DNS servers in the datacenter, however, I try to keep a central location for critical services and branch from there.
• Use network addresses at all times
  
  • Hardware addresses are required to initially setup a network address but after that, you should never reference a resource by their hardware address. Especially for hardware you own, which will burn out and have to be replaced - thus getting a new hardware address.
    
  • This also allows us to....
• Segment your network by subnets, not floors
  
  • If you try to build a link for every floor down to the datacenter, you are going to start paying a lot of money for risers. Risers get more expensive the farther away the links are.
    
  • For the purposes of this guide, I also modify the Advanced Options to change the default Max netaddr length from 8 to 15. This gives you way more flexibility in setting up subnets.
• Have fun and experiment!
  
  • Remember, this a game. Play it how you want and see what you can make! Everyone's network will be different, this is just how I do mine.

The design that I use in my network is based around core routing. What I mean by this is there are primary routers housed in the datacenter that route requests for various networks to what I call network routers, which then handle the routing between the floors within their own network.

Each network will have their own local DNS caching resolver, which helps keep the main link bandwidth open for user requests and lookups contained to their network. These caching resolvers are then allowed to route to the datacenter through the router to the authoritative resolvers, where the primary zones are hosted.

This network segmentation makes it fairly easy to stick firewalls inside the network to protect against scraping and worm attacks, but the downside is you will need a lot of them across your network.

By splitting the floors into logical segments, you can quickly onboard new floors and expand as necessary. A key component to setting this up efficiently is using your clipboard in-game to keep track of what you are defining as the various networks. I like to do something like this:

• Network 1:
  
  • Floors 1, 2, and 3
    
  • Producer on Floor 2 @n1/f2/chat

As you expand, you can use this as a way to keep notes of where your networks are growing. A bonus thing to note would be which links connect down to the datacenter as well.

Getting used to the way subnets work in this game will be key for this setup. Router rules based on network addresses will help standardize your configuration and allow you mostly copy the rules from one to the other. I'd still recommend you back these up when you get access to the sftp command though!

Common subnet patterns that I use are as follows:

• @dc/
  
  • Contains core routing layer and other essential services that I want to host in the datacenter floor
• @n#/
  
  • Corresponds to the segmented networks that I create, which are a combination of multiple floors linked together via risers.
    
  • I tend to group three floors together as a single network and connect these users through a switch, which then connects through the router (or alternatively a firewall, then router), which can then either forward requests to local services (such as DNS or VOIP services) or route to the datacenter to switch networks.
    
  • These networks utilize short riser connections to connect the three floors together, and then one longer connection to the datacenter. This saves on costs for the shorter links but has a downside that the longer link may have to be upgraded sooner than typical due to more users traversing over the single riser link.
• @n#/f#
  
  • Corresponds to a specific floor within a network. There are some exceptions to how I handle this (for example the software update producers generally get direct lines back to the datacenter floor to allow for higher throughput directly to them).

An example setup would look something like this:

• Core Router:
  
  • @n1/ connects via port1
    
  • @n2/ connects via port2
    
  • @dc/ connects via port7
    
    • This port will guide traffic to the various services hosted on the datacenter floor itself, such as DNS queries
• The rules on this router direct traffic to the correct subnet

An example rule would be as follows:


Any consumer or producer that is associated to network 1 (such as an auth provider, which could be located at network address @n1/f2/auth) will be forwarded along this link from the core router.

Adding additional networks is as simple as modifying the destination subnet (the @n1/ in my example) and the port number for where this subnet is located.

Once a request lands on a specific network, you then have to know how to route inside the network. There are a couple of ways of doing this, none of which are particularly wrong. A common way I'll do this is collect all of the users from the three floors into a single switch where the network router is located, connect them to the switch, then connect the switch to a firewall, and then the firewall to the router. This will mean that users will follow the path from lowest port number on the switch to the highest until they reach the router, so it's not exactly bandwidth-efficient (VLANs could potentially help here, but again, this guide is not going to go over them). The router then has a separate link to the local DNS server and any other services that may be used.

Some example rules in the network router would be (where the router is assigned network address @n1/router):


The below screenshot shows how I have a network configured, along with the routes that I have in place on the left side of the screen. I've annotated the router connections to map what the destination network address is set so that you can get a better visualization of how the rules are configured.


The only item that is not currently noted is the traffic rule for udp/5060. This is to ensure that the packets from a phone that exists on Floor 3 route down to the datacenter. I've not had much luck with these packets following the default route but instead have to explicitly include traffic rules for them.

While not exactly a screenshot of the network in game, this is a visual representation of what one of my networks would look like:



This at least provides a bit of a map for how to get the various moving pieces configured.

Once you have this framework down, expansion is a matter of managing your networks, making sure your equipment and risers can handle the bandwidth, and maintaining backups of your device configurations. At a certain point, you'll start running out of ports on your core router (in many cases, I'll start out with the Disco Milli router). Once you've reached this limit, you'll have to decide if you want to use one of the *actual* core routers in the game to further segment this out, which would be something like this:

core router -> edge router -> network router -> switch -> consumers/producers

This isn't necessarily the cheapest or the most efficient setup, but it has helped me get a better handle on routing rules, and keep myself from going a little nuts on setting up new floors as they come in (especially when I'm not playing in Zen mode).

I'm fully open to suggestions on this guide in the comments. This is my first ever Steam guide but I wanted to put this together to help folks that may have trouble with routers or how to set up their networks in the game. While this isn't strictly a beginner's guide to that, this should at least shed some light on a possible way to create a network that is easy enough to create with the hardware available at the start while also allowing you to expand as needed. I don't claim to be an expert in this game and am still learning quite a bit, so if you see a flaw in my setup or have some constructive feedback for me, I'm happy to hear it!