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One of the perils of the tight Steam integration in Borderlands 2 that my brother and I discovered last night, is that if either of us lose our connection to the friends list server, our game goes down. When that happened to us last night, I decided to give Hamachi a try in order to create a LAN game.

We downloaded Hamachi and got the vLAN set up easily enough, but my brother had no luck searching for the LAN game I had just created. The wikia article gives a couple of solutions, but I'm not sure if they're specific to Borderlands, or apply to Borderlands 2 as well;

  1. Do these solutions apply to Borderlands 2 at all?
  2. How do I either specify the IP to connect to or the NIC to use when searching for a LAN game?

If those solutions don't apply, what is the solution for playing Borderlands 2 over Hamachi?

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the article linked is written for the original Borderlands, but the contents of the article itself is pretty generic and would apply to most games. It is possible that the ports used by Borderlands 2 have changed since the first Borderlands game though. – kalina Sep 19 '12 at 11:33
@pixel: Specifically, I was referring to the last bullet point in the Solutions section, which I reference in the question. – MBraedley Sep 19 '12 at 12:04
This guide is also for Borderlands (original) so I'm not sure if the command line parameters will be valid for Borderlands 2, but contains some stuff that might be worth trying. – kalina Sep 19 '12 at 12:06
@pixel: boo work filter. Okay, I'll take a look at that tonight. – MBraedley Sep 19 '12 at 12:07

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Well, I just got it working. (Kudos to jesseodonoghue on Youtube) Basically you need to do this. Change the path of the shortcut to:

"C:\Program Files\2K Games\Borderlands 2\Binaries\Win32\Borderlands2.­exe" 5.0.0.0

Where 5.0.0.0 needs to be changed to the Hamachi IP of the hoster on Hamachi. Note the host does not need to do this, only the connectors. And it works. Just tried it then... GREAT SUCCESS!

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I'm assuming that you do something similar when using the Steam version by creating a new shortcut in Steam and specifying the IP in the shortcut. – MBraedley Sep 20 '12 at 17:40
First time I had to try this. Worked like a charm. Thanks. – MBraedley Oct 4 '12 at 0:08
up vote 2 down vote

I work in a place that does not allow port forwarding for the required ports. I was able to play a LAN game with a friend on the outside by following these steps:

  • Each person installed the latest version of Hamachi
  • A friend created a network through the LogMeIn panel and sent me the network name and password.
  • I started Hamachi, hit the power button, then entered the network name and password. Hamachi showed that I was connected and could see the other computers on the network.
  • In BL2, I went to the Network Options, and set it to LAN mode.
  • I "selected the "Continue" option to go to my existing game.
  • After waiting a minute or so, BL2 detected that my friend was in BL2. I invited him to my game and he connected successfully.
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Hmm, maybe I just had some stuff configured poorly. – MBraedley Sep 19 '12 at 17:22
@MBraedley It did take a minute or two for BL@ to find that my friend was logged into BL2 to show him as a possible invite. You might also try closing/opening the game to force BL2 to do a fresh LAN network scan. – Shaun Sep 19 '12 at 17:26
up vote 2 down vote

If you can't manage to get Hamachi to work, you might want to try Evolve's VPN feature. It reportedly works better for zero-configuration LAN games than Hamachi does and comes with a few extra videogame-specific bells and whistles.

Full disclosure: I'm a developer on Evolve.

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My point was that you didn't need to have to worry about looking at guides or using direct IP connect to play the game. You often do with Hamachi and Tunngle due to how their VPNs work, but Evolve uses the actual private IP ranges, which tend to have a higher chance of just working out of the box. You wanted to know how to play Borderlands over LAN and you clearly had issues getting Hamachi to work, so I offered an alternative solution. – dreijer Sep 20 '12 at 2:22
Eh. Disclosure or not, this still feels quite spammy. – fbueckert Sep 20 '12 at 3:16
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@fbueckert I think this answer is more okay than it's not okay. If a question asks "How do I do X with Y", "use Z instead of Y" is generally an acceptable answer (think X = parsing HTML, Y = regexps). The answerer also gave full disclosure. – badp♦ Sep 21 '12 at 10:42
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@MBraedley I agree, and I even ran into your very same trouble yesterday while trying to get a LAN game going with Torchlight II and LAN discovery and Hamachi; no matter what we tried, we were unable to join in the same game. I remain however of the opinion that "Use a different tool" is a reasonable answer, although maybe not what you want to hear. – badp♦ Sep 21 '12 at 10:55
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@badp I'm always a fan of, "Hey, this might work." But it sounded far too promotional prior to your edit. – fbueckert Sep 21 '12 at 12:22
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