Big Walk Public Lobbies

Browse rooms hosted by players with this mod and join them with one click — the room password is shown right on the card and typed into the vanilla password prompt for you (you still press the original confirm button).

The game's latest update forces every new room to have a password, which made plain public-room lists useless (you could see rooms but never join them). This mod pivots around that: hosts who opt in publish their room as a modded room (bwpl_open="1") together with its password as a public lobby attribute, and the browser lists exactly those rooms. Joining goes through the original in-game flow (JoinMenu.ConnectTo), including the original password prompt and error menus — the vanilla password authentication is never bypassed.

Features

• Tagged-room browser: "Public Lobbies" button on the main menu → a single targeted EOS search for bwpl_open="1" rooms (up to 200 per round — more than the entire tagged community). Every refresh is a fresh snapshot; no cache.
• Password on the card: the first line shows World · Password: xyz. Three states are distinguished: the actual password, an explicit empty password (none), and unavailable (tagged rooms from older mod versions before password publishing, or passwords longer than 64 bytes which are never published truncated). Passwords render literally (rich text off) and control characters show as symbols (␍␊␉) instead of breaking the layout.
• Automatic publishing: with the room tag enabled (Host-page switch or cfg), hosting a room writes the tag and the current password into the lobby's public attributes. Changing your password in-game syncs the list automatically — clearing it (or setting an oversized one) removes the attribute so an old password never lingers.
• The password is public data by design: anyone who can find the lobby can read it — that's the feature. Joining still goes through the vanilla password authentication.
• Password typed in for you: when you join a listed room from the panel and the server asks for a password, the vanilla prompt opens pre-filled with that room's published password — the mod only fills the field, it never submits: you press the original confirm button (so you can check or edit it first). It is armed for one prompt only, expires after 30 s, and is discarded if the room you are connecting to is not the one you clicked. Toggle with [Join] AutoFillPassword.
• Join like vanilla: JoinMenu.ConnectTo(joinCode) — original "Connecting…" screen, original password prompt, original error menu on failure.
• EOS handle recycling (fixes the post-update "can't join any room with a network error" report): the game's search implementation never releases its EOS handles, and older mod versions leaked dozens per refresh until the per-user quota broke all searches — including the join-by-code lookup. This version releases every LobbyDetails and LobbySearch handle as soon as a round's results are consumed, recycles searches that were still in flight when a batch timed out or the panel was closed, and fires exactly one search per refresh.
• Strict tagging: a room counts as a modded room only when its bwpl_open value is exactly "1"; rounds whose native filter setup failed are discarded whole.
• "My language only" filter: rooms whose world/host name is in your language (Chinese / Japanese / Korean / Russian by script, Latin-family languages together), following the game language live. The Chinese filter uses multi-signal detection to keep Japanese rooms out.
• Live player counts (3/8) on every card; full rooms are hidden automatically.
• Virtualized, stutter-free list: only ~15 card slots exist regardless of result count; room-name and password glyphs are pre-baked during the scan so scrolling never bakes glyphs on the fly. Pixel-identical card style (68-high, three lines 18/14/13).
• 15-language UI following the game's language, switching live.
• F5 developer mode (DevMode): open/close the panel in any scene to check your own room is listed correctly.

Requirements

• BepInExPack IL2CPP (installed automatically)

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.bigwalk.publiclobbies.cfg:

• [Search] TaggedRounds = 1 — targeted search rounds per refresh. One round already returns all tagged rooms (200-result cap, deterministic order); extra rounds are redundancy only. 0 disables searching entirely (no request is sent; the list stays empty). Max 10.
• [Mod] EnableRoomTag = true — tag rooms you host and publish their password to the public-room list. Turning it off stops future publishing; it does not retroactively untag an existing room (host a new room to clear it).
• [Join] AutoFillPassword = true — pre-fill the vanilla password prompt with the published password when joining a listed room (fill only, never submit).
• [Dev] DevMode = false — F5 opens/closes the panel anywhere.
• [Debug] Verbose = false — detailed diagnostic logging (never includes password values).

Privacy notes

• The published password is stored as a public EOS lobby attribute: any client that can search for the lobby can read it. Do not enable the room tag with a password you reuse anywhere else.
• The mod never logs password values, never submits a password for you, and does not modify the game's authentication — HouseAuthenticator still compares it server-side.

Known limitations

• Rooms tagged by mod versions before 1.5.0 carry no password attribute — they still appear, shown as Password: unavailable.
• Passwords longer than 64 UTF-8 bytes are not published (they are never truncated — a truncated password would be wrong); such rooms also show unavailable.
• EOS's 200-result cap applies per search round; if the tagged community ever exceeds 200 concurrent rooms, the list shows the first 200 in EOS's deterministic order.
• Colored emoji are rendered monochrome by TMP; scripts with no Windows system font (e.g. Javanese) may still show as boxes.