Ya you don’t necessary have to do that…but I was offline for a week and another device nabbed the IP, so could no longer connect to it. Even trying the new DHCP leased IP it gave it didn’t work when I tried to connect.

So, had to allocate a fixed / static IP of my choosing (there were a bunch of options), reset the router, and it worked⚡️ just took me forever to figure out how to do that because I’m technically challenged lol