You cannot join your friend

Players report the timeout surviving everything they tried: restarting, reinstalling, verifying game files, and handing hosting to somebody else. One describes a group of four playing fine for half an hour until the host crashed, after which any two people could connect but the rest could not. The developers have not responded in the thread.

That last detail is the interesting one. If any two people can connect but the rest cannot, the variable is not any single person's router. We are not going to tell you what it is: House House have not said, and we do not know. But it is worth knowing before you spend an evening reconfiguring your network.

What is worth trying

The developers publish exactly one piece of network guidance, and it is about bandwidth rather than configuration:

“Quit other network-heavy programs, shut down devices saturating your connection, move closer to the wireless router, and go wired over ethernet if you can.” Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)

Apply it to the host first. Everything runs through their machine, so their connection and their framerate are everyone's problem rather than just their own. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)

The developers also now ask you to do the obvious thing properly: Before anyone joins, the host should have the game running with their character loaded into the world, and should watch for connection warnings in the lower left of their screen. If joining still fails, everyone should close Big Walk completely, reopen it and try again. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab) checked 12 Aug 2026

Beyond that: have the host fully quit and start a fresh session, so everyone gets a new join code. Several reports involve a session that went wrong after a host crash, and a clean restart costs nothing but the walk back.

What we are not going to tell you to do

Search this error and you will find specific instructions: enable UPnP, forward UDP 30000–30010, forward UDP 27015–27030. We are not repeating them, and you should know why before you follow them somewhere else.

• House House still publish nothing about ports, NAT or firewalls. They do publish connection troubleshooting, and it grew on 12 August to cover system clocks, host readiness and connection warnings. None of it mentions a port. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)
• None of the port numbers trace to a source. 27015–27030 is Valve's general-purpose Source engine range, which is what you would copy in if you were guessing.
• One of the sites promoting them sells a ping booster. A vendor whose product is “your network is the problem” is not a neutral party on the question of whether your network is the problem.

Port forwarding is not dangerous, and if you already know your way around your router you will lose nothing but time. But nobody has shown it fixes this, and the player reports point away from individual connections rather than towards them.

“Are the servers down?”

There are no servers to be down. Big Walk has no dedicated servers and no matchmaking: one player hosts, everyone else connects to that person's machine, the save lives with them, and the session ends when they stop playing. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)

This is worth internalising because it changes where you look. There is no status page to check and no outage to wait out. When several people cannot connect at once, the thing they have in common is the host, not a service.

If the game says the session is not available

That is a different failure from a timeout, and it now has its own page: join code not working, or session not available. Wording along those lines points at a session that has ended rather than at your connection, and since 1.4.9 it can also mean you have the code but not the password.

Check everyone is on the same version. Big Walk is being patched steadily — 1.4.7, 1.4.8 and 1.4.9 all shipped in August — and the developers are precise about what has to match: Only the first two numbers of the version have to match for players to play together. A group on 1.4.7 and 1.4.9 is fine; a group split between 1.3 and 1.4 is not. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)

They have not said a version mismatch causes the timeout specifically, so treat it as a cheap thing to rule out rather than a documented cause. 1.4.7 in particular lists “improvements to host stability” and to the friends' game browser, so being current is worth something here regardless. Big Walk (House House) (primary source, opens in a new tab)

Searching this error brings back confident, specific instructions — relay servers, matching the first two digits of a version number, waiting exactly thirty seconds. We could not trace any of it to House House or a storefront, and two of the sites publishing it sell ping boosters. It is the same pattern as the port numbers above, so we are leaving it out.

If none of that works, report it

Then you have probably reached the end of what you can do from your side, and the useful thing left is to tell the people who can fix it. The Steam thread has no developer response, which is more likely to change if people write in than if everyone keeps reinstalling.

If a fix is confirmed, or the developers say anything, we will update this section and date the change.