Big Walk backpacks and belts: how many there are, and why they matter more than they look

They are not storage. They are the save button.

This is the part almost nothing else explains, and it is the reason a backpack is worth a detour. When everyone logs off, loose items return to where they came from — a gourd goes back to its puzzle, and equipment goes back to wherever it was sitting.

The exception is what is being carried. Items a player is holding, or has attached to a bag or a belt, stay where they are. So the same night can end two ways depending on one decision nobody tells you to make.

A group that had just cleared the red tower posted about exactly this: they logged back in and found the backpack and the radios they had collected were gone, with only the default equipment left in the map room. Their question — do we have to go all the way back for them — is the one this page exists to prevent.

So the habit worth building is boring and it works: before anyone signs off, put the things you care about on someone's back or hip.

• Loose on the ground — returns to its origin overnight
• In a player's hands — stays
• On a backpack or belt — stays
• Default map room equipment — always there, and not what you lose

How many there are

The counts come from players who went looking rather than from House House, and one of them has been searched hard enough to become a running complaint. A thread titled simply "Why are there only five belts?" drew 242 upvotes.

Six backpacks and five belts is the figure most often repeated, and the mismatch is what bothers people — six players can each wear a pack, but the sixth has no belt. One player said they had searched nearly every inch of the map for a sixth and concluded it does not exist.

Belts hold two items. That sounds small until you play as a pair, where the standard trick is to treat your partner as a walking two-slot inventory and to agree who carries what before setting out.

• 6 backpacks — one per player up to a full-size group
• 5 belts — one fewer than the packs, which is the complaint
• 2 slots per belt
• One belt sits in the tunnels, and it is the one people miss

You cannot reach your own back

Put something on your backpack and you cannot simply take it off again. Someone else has to do it for you. There is a whole running joke about the moment you realise this while standing alone.

Read as an inconvenience it is annoying. Read as design it is the same idea as the proximity voice and the soundproof rooms: the game keeps arranging things so that you need the person next to you. Your storage is not yours, it is the group's, and it only opens when somebody is nearby.

The practical consequence is worth planning around. Do not put the thing you will need alone on your own back. Put the map on your hip, put the puzzle piece on your partner.

What experienced groups actually carry

With two slots on a belt and one back each, the loadout question settles quickly once a group has lost something.

The most repeated pairing from players who have finished is the map and the camera. The map beats the in-game position readouts for planning a route, and the camera means a mistake does not cost the whole evening because you can photograph a puzzle state before touching it.

There is also an item worth going out of your way for: on a platform with a weather balloon near the beach by the green tower, players found a blue triangular insert that fits in a backpack and lets it hold two of the puzzle rewards at once. If your group is ferrying gourds, that halves the trips.

• Map — better than the in-world position readers for planning
• Camera — photograph a puzzle before you change it
• Radio — for the moments the group splits
• The blue triangle insert — lets one backpack carry two gourds

The equipment nobody has finished counting

Backpacks and belts are the two that have been counted hard enough to argue about. The rest of the kit has not, and it is worth being honest that the numbers thin out fast beyond those two.

The same player who searched the map for a sixth belt asked openly how many flare guns, megahorns and walkie-talkies there are, having collected three flare guns — a red, a blue and a yellow — and got no confident answer. Nobody has published a count we would repeat.

That matters more than it sounds for a group planning a run. If you are deciding what to carry, plan around the two totals that are settled and treat everything else as found rather than farmed: pick up a flare or a megahorn when you pass one, and do not send someone across the island expecting a known number to be waiting.

The three cowbells nobody finds

The best-received comment in that belts thread was not about belts. It was a group explaining that they had made everyone who kept getting lost wear a bell, so the rest of them could hear where that person was jumping around.

There are three cowbells, in different colours and sizes. They sit at the base, just beside the Lost and Found, and they are part of the opening tutorial — which is exactly why they get missed, because nobody is looking for equipment in the first ten minutes.

How overlooked are they? A player who had just finished the game at 100% replied that they did not think they had found bells at all.

If your group has someone who drifts, this is the fix the game already gave you.

If you cannot work out how to pick one up

You are not the first. There is a thread from two brothers whose title is just an admission that they could not figure out how to take the backpacks off the stand.

Backpacks sit on pavilions with circular mounts rather than lying on the ground, which is why they read as scenery. If a pack looks fixed in place, it is worth a second attempt from a different angle rather than assuming it is decoration.

The same shape of confusion explains a separate mishap: one player bounced a gourd onto the third circle up on one of those pavilions and could not reach it. It reset overnight, as loose items do.