Waterpark Simulator Multiplayer, Co-op and Split Screen

The four-player limit

Four is the hard ceiling right now, and it catches out larger friend groups constantly. The studio describes it as a technical limit they are working on rather than a permanent design decision.

Until that changes, a group of five or more has to split across separate parks. There is no lobby setting or mod that raises the cap — the limit is in the netcode, not the options menu.

How hosting works

1. 1One player hosts by loading their own park. Progress saves to the host's world, not to the guests'.
2. 2Up to three others join through the platform friends list.
3. 3Everyone must own the game on the same platform — there is no crossplay.
4. 4The host can limit what guests are allowed to build using building permissions.

Building permissions are worth setting deliberately if you care about your park. A patch extended them so they also apply to actions taken through the in-game phone, closing a gap where guests could build in ways the host had not allowed. Update 1.0.91, on 11 September 2026, closed another one: pool plugs can now be disabled for non-hosts in the park management options, so a guest cannot pull the plug and drain a pool you just filled.

Public lobbies — sessions strangers can join without being on your friends list — reached PlayStation 5 on 10 September with build 1.000.010. Permissions are chosen when you create the lobby; the developer's answer to the first worried host was that the settings there let you switch off building and the other destructive actions before anyone is in. The Xbox notes of 28 August do not mention public lobbies either way; the updates page tracks each console build as it lands.

Split screen

Split screen has not been announced. Steam lists the game under Multi-player, Co-op and Online Co-op, and it does not carry the separate shared-or-split-screen category Steam uses for local play. That absence is suggestive but is not a formal statement, so we list split screen as not announced rather than ruled out.

For couch play in practice: two people in the same room still need two copies of the game and two systems. On PC that means two accounts; on console, two consoles on the same platform.

Talking to each other

Voice chat is built in. Text chat is not, and that is deliberate — the developer account explained that the game keeps your hands on the controller or keyboard almost constantly, and that keyboard communication does not translate to the console versions.

On PC there is a community mod that adds a full text-chat system, described by its author as being for people who would rather not use voice. It is a mod, so it is PC-only and will not help console players.

When a friend cannot join

The most common co-op complaint is a friend hanging on the loading screen or dropping out with "connection to host lost". It happens across friends-only, invite-only and public sessions alike.

The tell that this is not a broken install is that the affected player can usually load their own solo park fine and can eventually join other sessions. That points at session or host-side networking rather than corrupted files.

Whose progress is saved

Because co-op runs on the host's park, progress belongs to the host. A guest who spends an evening helping build someone else's park does not take any of that back to their own save. If everyone wants to keep progress, everyone has to host their own sessions in turn. The host's park is an ordinary save file on their machine, backed up and synced like any other, and the save file page covers what to do if it will not load.

This also affects achievements and quest counters, which are tracked per-park. Work done in a friend's world may not credit your own objectives, so if you are chasing a specific milestone, do it in the park where it counts.

Co-op at a glance

Players

4 max

Crossplay

None

Voice chat

Built in

Text chat

PC mod

Split screen

Not announced

Cloud saves

Steam Cloud