Big Walk asking for a password on a world you already had

The field is a create box, not an unlock box

This is the whole misunderstanding, and it is an easy one to have. The prompt looks identical to the one you get when a stranger's room is locked, so the natural reading is that your own save has been locked against you and you are being asked for a key you never made.

It is the opposite. The game is asking you to create a password for the lobby now, going forward. Whatever you type becomes the password. There is no correct answer to recover.

Once you are in, the word you chose is what everyone else needs. Nothing about your progress, your gourds or your host status has changed.

Why lobbies suddenly need passwords

The change did not come out of nowhere. Five days before it landed, a post explaining that Big Walk lobbies were not private reached the top of the game's subreddit with 61 upvotes and 86 replies.

The problem it described: lobby numbers appeared on a list that modded clients could read, so an unprotected room could be joined by anyone who wanted to, with no guessing involved. The game ships without anticheat, so someone who joined that way could move objects around and undo a group's evening.

That was not hypothetical. In the days before the update, several groups posted about strangers appearing in their sessions — one of them wandered around with a question mark for a username and teleported between towers; another introduced himself as John Bigwalk, hung around for five minutes and jumped off a tower.

Read in that light, the password prompt is the fix, not the fault.

Two accounts of what to type, and we cannot settle it

We are going to be straight about this rather than pick the tidier answer. Two players who hit the problem within hours of each other describe different behaviour.

One says the field simply creates a new password and you can type anything at all. The other says they had to enter the name of their save in the password field, calls that strange themselves, and reports that it worked.

Both are first-hand accounts from the same day, and both are unverified. We do not own the game and cannot test which is right, and neither has been confirmed by anyone official. Try inventing a password first, because that is the account with the fuller explanation behind it; if the lobby refuses it, your save name is the next thing to try.

Getting your group back in

Once you are through, the sequence is ordinary. Decide the password, tell the group, and they enter it alongside the Join Code as usual — the code still identifies the room, the password just gates it.

Worth agreeing on something you will all remember next week, because the host holds the save and the group only continues when the host is around. A password nobody can recall is a second way to lose a run.

1. 1Host picks the password when the prompt appears
2. 2Everyone else needs both the Join Code and that password
3. 3Crossplay is unaffected — Steam, PS5 and Switch 2 players use the same pair
4. 4Pick something the group will still remember at the next session

If you were recruiting strangers, this changes that too

There is a second group this affects, and it is the one least likely to work out what happened. Big Walk has no matchmaking, so people who need a fourth player post an open lobby somewhere public — the subreddit runs a Looking For Group megathread every day, and it fills up.

Until now a post like that only needed a Join Code. From now on it needs the password as well, or nobody arriving from it can get in. If you posted a code today and heard nothing back, that is the likelier reason than a lack of interest.

It is worth thinking about in the other direction too. The reason the change exists is that open rooms were being found and joined by people nobody invited, so if you are posting publicly the password is doing a job — pick a real one and share it in the same place, rather than something guessable.

What we checked, and what we could not find

Because this page runs on player reports, here is exactly how far we got looking for something better.

Steam's news feed for Big Walk carries no patch note for this change; the newest official announcement there remains version 1.4.8 from 7 August, which was about voice volume. Searching the open web for it returns pages that still describe 1.4.8 as current, which is what you would expect for something that happened hours ago.

So we are reporting what players report, and we will replace this section the moment there is an announcement to point at.

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