Big Walk isn't picking up my microphone

By DayOneFix Editorial · August 9, 2026

This page is for the case where Big Walk captures nothing from you at all. If people can hear you but everyone sounds faint, that is the separate — and now fixed — quiet voice chat issue. Raising output volume cannot make an unavailable microphone appear, so it is worth being sure which of the two you have before you start changing settings.

Start with the meter, because it splits the problem in two

Open SettingsAudio and watch Microphone Activity while you talk.

• The meter moves → Big Walk is receiving your voice. The fault is downstream: you are muted, silenced, or the other players’ end is the problem. Go to the next section.
• The meter doesn’t move → the game never got any audio. Nothing inside Big Walk will fix this; it is your device, your driver, or your Bluetooth profile. Skip to the hardware sections.

This single check is worth doing first because it decides which half of this page applies to you, and most people spend their time in the wrong half.

If the meter moves but nobody hears you

Three official checks, in the order that catches the most people:

1. Mute Mode is set to “hold”. In SettingsAudio. With hold-to-talk enabled you must hold the key down, and everything you say before pressing it is silence. This is the most common false “broken mic” in the game.
2. Someone has been silenced in the moderation menu. A player who has been silenced gets no indication of it — they hear everyone normally and talk into a void. Check the moderation list before assuming hardware.
3. You’re muted on the device itself. The physical mute switch on a headset, or a boom mic that mutes when raised, is genuinely a common cause and costs five seconds to rule out.

If the meter doesn’t move

Confirm the mic works in another app first — a voice recorder, Discord, or the operating system’s own sound settings. If it fails there too, the problem was never Big Walk’s.

Then check the plug. Fully seated, correct jack. Named in the official troubleshooting precisely because it does happen.

The Bluetooth trap that removes your microphone

This is the one worth understanding properly, because the symptom is total mic failure with no error anywhere and it is not a Big Walk bug.

A Bluetooth headset connects in one of two modes:

• High-quality audio (A2DP) — stereo playback, sounds great, and provides no microphone channel whatsoever. Your headset mic simply does not exist to the system in this mode.
• Headset / hands-free / call mode (HSP/HFP) — provides a microphone channel, at noticeably lower playback quality.

If your headset is connected in high-quality mode, no in-game setting can recover the mic, because there is nothing to recover. Switch the connection to headset or call mode in your operating system’s Bluetooth or sound settings. Labels differ by platform — Windows exposes the same headset as two separate devices, macOS switches profiles automatically when an app requests the mic, and it does not always get it right.

Expect the audio quality to drop when you switch. That is the Bluetooth profile trade-off, not a second fault. A wired headset avoids the whole problem, and for a game built entirely around talking, that is a reasonable thing to own.

Reported by players, not documented officially

From the Steam discussion on voice chat not working: the original poster’s mic worked in both Steam and Discord but not in Big Walk, and a full system reboot resolved it for one player on Linux. Worth trying — a reboot is cheap — but note Big Walk officially supports Windows and macOS, so a Linux result does not transfer cleanly. Another participant suggested disabling noise suppression in the game settings as a test. House House has not responded in that thread or documented either as a fix.

Related

• Voices audible but faint → voice chat too quiet, fixed in patch 1.4.8
• Can’t get into a session at all → the connection checklist, starting with your system clock
• Everything else → Big Walk guide

Sources

The Microphone Activity meter, Mute Mode, moderation silencing, device-mute and plug checks are from the official Big Walk FAQ. The Bluetooth profile explanation is standard A2DP/HSP behaviour, which applies to every application, not just this game. The reboot and noise-suppression suggestions are player reports from the Steam discussion linked above.