QEMU; Static IP over NAT?

I have never set up a static IP in Linux… I wonder if it works the same for a virtual machine? So I created a virtual machine that would handle my bots, that way I wouldn’t have to re-install them every darn time I want to ‘ghost’ my computer. Problem is. I restarted my computer a couple of times after some updates and now my bots just stopped working. Which sucks.

When I installed Ubuntu, I installed 20:04 LTS since the newer seems to have a .NET problem, that isn’t present in the older version of Ubuntu. Anyway, my bots worked fine, and I got really happy with the result.

Today I rebooted the computer, and I started the virtual machine. lo and behold, not working… My computer basically broke the installs, by changing the IP from 192.168.122.218 to 192.168.122.81, when I tested that instead it just won’t show up.

I need my VM to constantly be .218 so my voicebot will work.

EDIT; It seems as though the darn internet connection to the virtual machine is down, so I don’t need to set a static IP, the problem here is I don’t know how to restart the service, since I don’t know which one MIGHT fix it or not.