How to Transfer Save Files and Change Hosts in Big Walk (PC Guide)

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Imagine this specific, painful scenario: you and five friends have spent the last four hours trekking through the dense, sprawling Australian bushland of Big Walk. You have successfully navigated a treacherous river crossing, communicated solely through static-filled walkie-talkies with fading batteries, and set up a temporary basecamp using whiteboards to map out your next geographic destination. Everything is operating smoothly and the group is making incredible progress on a massive environmental puzzle. But then, tragedy strikes. Your designated host—the person whose internet connection is currently keeping this entire expedition alive—suddenly drops offline. Worse, they message the group chat on their phone to say their internet service provider is experiencing an area outage that will not be resolved until tomorrow.

Normally, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) hosted cooperative game without dedicated servers, your entire adventure would be put on indefinite hold. You cannot simply boot up the world on your own machine and continue exploring without the original host present. However, a highly requested workaround has just been discovered by the community for PC players. According to a recent Reddit post by user aykimchi2000, you can manually transfer the host save file from one PC to another player, allowing your group to seamlessly change hosts and pick up exactly where you left off.

Below is a detailed walkthrough on how to perform this manual save transfer on Windows PC, why the underlying network architecture makes it necessary, and what this community-reported workaround means for those playing on Mac, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2.

The Problem: Peer-to-Peer Networking vs Dedicated Servers

To understand why we need to move files around manually, we first need to look at how House House designed the multiplayer infrastructure for Big Walk. Rather than utilizing centralized dedicated servers where the world state is stored safely in the cloud 24/7, the game relies on a traditional peer-to-peer hosting system. When you start a brand new session, one player’s specific hardware becomes the definitive “server” for that instance of the world.

While this localized approach keeps ongoing server costs down for the developer and ensures the game will remain playable long after any official servers would theoretically shut down in the distant future, it creates a massive single point of failure for large groups. The game boldly supports up to 12 players in a single session. Coordinating 12 different real-life schedules is difficult enough, but if the designated host has technical issues, a random power outage, or simply needs to log off before everyone else is ready to stop, the entire lobby is forcefully disbanded.

We have already seen players scrambling to find ways around these limitations. If you have read our previous coverage on How the Big Walk Community is Organizing Massive 12-Player Expeditions, you know that out-of-game coordination is often the biggest hurdle to enjoying the experience. This newly confirmed save file transfer method is a massive relief for dedicated groups who want to share hosting responsibilities evenly across different play sessions.

Step-by-Step Guide: Transferring the Host Save File on Windows PC

Before you begin this process, please ensure that both the original host and the new intended host have completely closed the game. Attempting to copy or move save files while Big Walk is actively running in the background can reportedly lead to severe file corruption. If you want to be extra cautious, you should consult our general Big Walk PC Save File Location and Backup Guide to make a duplicate copy of your data before proceeding with the steps below.

Step 1: Locate the Original Host’s Save Data

The person who hosted the previous session needs to navigate to the hidden AppData folder on their Windows machine to extract the world files.

1. Press the Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog box.
2. Copy and paste the following directory path exactly as written: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\House House\Big Walk\user_data\save_games
3. Press Enter. This will open the Windows File Explorer directly to the specific folder where the game engine stores your multiplayer world states.

Step 2: Identify the Correct Files

Inside the save_games folder, you will likely see a few different files, especially if you have played multiple different sessions. You are looking specifically for the files ending in the .sav and .sav.bak extensions.

• The .sav file is the primary world state database, containing everything from the exact positions of dropped tools like maps and compasses, to the state of the environmental puzzles you have solved.
• The .sav.bak file is the automatic backup created by the game engine just in case the primary file becomes corrupted during a crash.

Select both of these files and copy them to your desktop, or compress them into a .zip folder to make them much easier to send over the internet.

Step 3: Send the Files to the New Host

Using Discord, email, a Google Drive link, or any other standard file-sharing method, send the .sav and .sav.bak files to the player who has agreed to take over the hosting duties. Because these are relatively small data files, the transfer should only take a few seconds even on a slow connection.

Step 4: Install the Save Data on the New Host’s PC

Now, the new host needs to place these exact files into the corresponding directory on their own machine.

1. The new host presses Windows Key + R and enters %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\House House\Big Walk\user_data\save_games.
2. Important Note: As community user aykimchi2000 accurately pointed out, if the new host has never hosted a multiplayer session of Big Walk before, the save_games folder might not actually exist on their computer yet.
3. If the folder is missing, you have two simple options. You can either launch the game, start a quick brand-new hosted session, and immediately quit out to force the game to generate the necessary folder structure. Or, you can manually create a new folder named save_games directly inside the user_data directory.
4. Once the folder is open and ready, simply paste the received .sav and .sav.bak files inside.

When the new host boots up Big Walk and navigates to the “Host Game” menu from the main title screen, the transferred save should now magically appear in their list of available sessions. They can load into the world, invite the rest of the group, and all the previous progress, whiteboard drawings, and unlocked shortcuts will be exactly as the original host left them.

Troubleshooting the Transfer Process

While the community has heavily confirmed this method works reliably as of late August 2026, there are a few potential technical hiccups you might run into when manually managing local application files.

Steam Cloud Conflicts: Steam’s built-in Cloud synchronization can sometimes aggressively try to overwrite your newly pasted local files with what it thinks is the “correct” older cloud version. If the new host pastes the save file, boots up the game, and does not see the new save in the menu, Steam Cloud might have quietly deleted it. To fix this frustrating issue, right-click Big Walk in your Steam Library, go to Properties, disable Steam Cloud temporarily, paste the files again, and boot the game. Once the save is properly registered and loaded once, you can safely turn Cloud Sync back on.

Inventory and Character Data: A very common question regarding these save transfers is what happens to individual player inventories and cosmetics. Big Walk handles player states dynamically. Your personal character customization, such as the distinct colors you choose (which you can learn more about in our guide on How to Change Character Color and Appearance), is tied to your local client, not the host’s world save. However, crucial tools physically dropped in the world are tied to the host’s .sav file. If you were holding a vital item when the old host disconnected, it is highly recommended to log back in and check your inventory, as the game usually returns you to the last safe auto-save state.

What Does This Mean for Mac, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2?

Currently, this save transfer method is entirely community-reported and has only been strictly confirmed to work on Windows PC. But what about the massive population of players on the other platforms in the game’s ecosystem?

For Mac players, a similar manual transfer is theoretically expected to work, as Mac operating systems handle local application data in a fairly accessible way, much like Windows. Mac users would need to navigate to their equivalent Library/Application Support directory for House House to find the .sav files. However, we have not yet seen definitive community confirmation of the exact Mac file path for Big Walk, so attempt this at your own risk.

For console players on the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, the situation is unfortunately far more restrictive. Both Sony and Nintendo operate heavily closed ecosystems that aggressively encrypt save data and lock it directly to specific user accounts. You cannot simply put a PS5 save file onto a USB drive and give it to a friend to boot up on their account. Unless House House eventually implements a cloud-based server browser or a proprietary internal save-sharing system in a future update, console players are currently stuck relying on the original host for the entire duration of their playthrough.

Furthermore, regarding cross-platform save transfers (for example, a PC host sending their .sav file to a Mac player to host), the viability remains completely unconfirmed. While we know the game supports robust crossplay functionality for actually playing together (which we detailed heavily in Does Big Walk Support Crossplay and Cross-Progression?), manually moving a Windows configuration file to a Mac filesystem sometimes results in unexpected formatting errors.

The Future of Hosting in Big Walk

The rapid discovery of this manual save transfer method highlights a crucial friction point in Big Walk’s otherwise stellar cooperative design. The game demands a surprisingly high level of commitment, with players currently reporting lengthy 15 to 20-hour completion times to see everything the map has to offer. Tying dozens of hours of group progress to a single person’s hard drive feels slightly antiquated for a major multiplayer release in 2026.

While we certainly applaud the PC community for quickly finding a technical solution to keep their groups together, we hope House House considers building an official “Transfer Host” button directly into the game’s menu in a future patch. Until then, PC players now have the knowledge required to keep their expeditions moving forward, no matter whose internet router decides to give out. Keep your walkie-talkies charged, keep your whiteboards updated, and always remember to back up your save files before embarking on your next big adventure into the bush.