Guide Link Play

Link play

Two copies of the game connect directly over UDP for battles and trades.

Connecting

START > LINK opens the link menu (a party is required). One player chooses HOST A GAME and shares the shown address; the other chooses JOIN A GAME and enters it. The default port is 7777; override it with the POKEPORT_LINK_PORT environment variable.

Compatibility

The handshake compares engine versions and a content fingerprint before anything else happens:

• Matching games (same engine, same link-relevant mods) get full battles and trades.
• A modified game meeting a differently-modded one falls back to a negotiated strict-vanilla trade subset — only mons both sides rebuild identically — and refuses battles rather than desyncing.
• An incompatible pairing is refused with a clear message, never a corrupted session.

The details, and how mod authors keep their mods link-safe, are in Link Compatibility.

Troubleshooting

• Both machines must reach each other on the UDP port — on separate networks that usually means a port forward for the host.
• "Are both games running the same mods?" after a desync means exactly that: align the mod sets (and versions) on both sides and reconnect.
• Trades that keep being refused under the subset verdict involve modded species or moves; trade vanilla mons, or install the same mods on both sides.