Network Adapters

Many games naively pick the first network adapter Windows reports. That breaks LAN play as soon as a VPN, Hamachi, or any other virtual adapter shadows the real LAN NIC — the game binds to, advertises, or browses on the wrong interface, and nobody on the LAN can see it.

The NetworkAdapters section presents the game a filtered view of the machine's adapters so that it lands on the one you want, without disabling or reordering anything on the host.

NetworkAdapters:
  Enabled: true
  Subnets: ['192.168.1.0/24', '10.0.0.0/8']   # IPv4 CIDR
  Names:   ['^Ethernet', 'Realtek']           # regex vs FriendlyName/Description
  MACs:    ['00:11:22:33:44:55']              # colon or dash separated

How It Works

This is an allow-list, the same model as DirectInput device filtering: an adapter is kept if it matches any configured filter, and every non-matching adapter is hidden from the enumeration APIs.

If all three lists are empty the feature is a no-op and every adapter is shown unchanged, regardless of Enabled. Nothing is hooked at all unless something asks for it, so leaving the section at its defaults costs the game nothing.

Option	Meaning
Enabled	Apply the filters below. false by default.
Subnets	IPv4 CIDR ranges. An adapter is kept if any of its IPv4 addresses falls inside one of them.
Names	Case-insensitive ECMAScript regex matched against each adapter's FriendlyName and Description
MACs	Physical addresses, colon- or dash-separated, case-insensitive

Partial matches count for Names, so anchor with ^ and $ for exact matching. Use single-quoted YAML strings for patterns so backslashes stay literal.

An entry that cannot be parsed — a malformed CIDR, an invalid regex, a MAC that is not six bytes — is skipped, and the remaining entries in that list still apply. If every entry in every list is skipped the section behaves as though it were empty.

Coverage

The three filters do not all have the same reach, because not every enumeration API exposes every attribute. Only Subnets can be applied to an API that reports addresses and nothing else:

Filter	Matched against	Covered APIs
Subnets	Each of the adapter's IPv4 addresses	GetAdaptersInfo, GetAdaptersAddresses, gethostbyname (local host), WSAIoctl SIO_GET_INTERFACE_LIST
Names	FriendlyName and Description	GetAdaptersInfo, GetAdaptersAddresses
MACs	Physical address	GetAdaptersInfo, GetAdaptersAddresses

By API:

• iphlpapi — GetAdaptersInfo, GetAdaptersAddresses (Subnets + Names + MACs)
• ws2_32 / wsock32 — gethostbyname for the local host (Subnets only)
• ws2_32 — WSAIoctl SIO_GET_INTERFACE_LIST (Subnets only)

Filtering is IPv4-only. An adapter with no IPv4 address can still be kept by a Names or MACs rule on the iphlpapi APIs.

Prefer a subnet rule

Subnets is the only filter that reaches every covered API, so a game that enumerates through Winsock rather than iphlpapi will only respond to a subnet rule. Start there and add Names or MACs when you need to disambiguate two adapters on the same subnet.

Logging

Set Logging.Network: true to record enumeration and hidden-adapter activity in the session log:

2026-08-14 20:11:47  [ADAPTER ENUM]    GetAdaptersAddresses
2026-08-14 20:11:47  [ADAPTER HIDE]    Hamachi
2026-08-14 20:11:47  [ADAPTER HIDE]    VirtualBox Host-Only Network

Every adapter the game asked for that does not appear in an [ADAPTER HIDE] line was shown to it. If a game still picks the wrong interface after filtering, the [ADAPTER ENUM] verb tells you which API it used — a game enumerating through WSAIoctl SIO_GET_INTERFACE_LIST will not respond to a Names or MACs rule.

Reading the Adapter List

Plugins and host applications can enumerate the canonical adapter list, with each adapter's allowed/hidden status, through the exported InterposerEnumNetworkAdapters. In .NET this is surfaced as InterposerService.EnumerateNetworkAdapters() returning NetworkAdapterInfo records:

Property	Meaning
FriendlyName	The adapter's friendly name, e.g. Ethernet
Description	The adapter's description, usually the NIC model
MacAddress	Physical address as 00:11:22:33:44:55, empty if none
IPv4Address	First IPv4 address, empty if none
IPv6Address	First IPv6 address, empty if none
Allowed	true if the adapter passes the configured filter, false if it is hidden from the game

This reports the real adapter set regardless of the filter, which makes it suitable for building a UI that lets a user pick which adapter a game should use.