Find your public IP for a Minecraft or Palworld server

Quick answer

Hosting a game server — Minecraft, Palworld, or anything self-hosted — means friends connect to your public IP. Here’s how to find it, share it, and make the connection actually work.

Step 1: Find your public IP

Your public IP is the address the outside internet uses to reach your network. It’s shown at the top of our homepage — that’s the one friends need, not the 192.168.x.x local address your PC shows internally. Copy it exactly.

Step 2: Understand the two addresses involved

There are two IPs in play: your PC’s local IP (private, like 192.168.1.20, used inside your network) and your public IP (what friends connect to). Your router sits between them. Friends use the public IP; your router needs to know which internal machine to forward their connection to — that’s port forwarding.

Step 3: Port-forward the game’s port

In your router’s admin page, forward the game’s port to your PC’s local IP. Minecraft Java uses TCP 25565 by default; Palworld uses UDP 8211; other games vary — check the server docs. Without this, friends reach your router but it doesn’t know to pass them to your game.

Give friends your public IP plus the port if it’s non-standard (e.g. 203.0.113.45:25565). They enter that as the server address. Test from outside your own network (ask a friend, or use mobile data) — connecting from inside your LAN can succeed even when external access is still broken.

The CGNAT problem

If port forwarding seems correct but nobody can connect, you may be behind carrier-grade NAT — common on mobile and many fibre ISPs like Jio. CGNAT means you don’t have a true dedicated public IP, so inbound connections can’t reach you no matter how you configure the router. The fixes: ask your ISP for a public/static IP, or use a tunnelling service (Playit, ngrok, or a Minecraft-specific tunnel) that sidesteps CGNAT.

If your IP changes

Most home IPs are dynamic, so the address you share today may change. For a stable address friends can always use, set up Dynamic DNS to map a hostname to your changing IP.