It took less than a day from the game’s release for multiple Content Warning mods to allow players to bypass the four person lobby limit—and less than a day after these mods blew up, the devs have shut them down indefinitely.
There are two extremely popular Content Warning player-count mods right now—Virality and the More Players mod—and both of them are no longer working as of April 3. Anyone previously using either mod will have experienced this for themselves, but an official announcement came on a Content Warning modding Discord server, where moderator “Max” was able to offer some insight sourced straight from one of the game’s developers.
According to Max, Content Warning devs have set a hard server limit on their end, and this isn’t something that modders are able to work around. In a subsequent announcement, the moderator shared a screenshot of their messages with a developer, in which the developer revealed the reason for this limit is that larger lobbies require larger server files that cannot be sent through Steam, and thus could incur additional unforeseen costs for the team behind Content Warning.
In short: the developers have fully (but possibly temporarily) shut down any and all mods that increase the lobby size in Content Warning. They didn’t do this out of malice, but because they genuinely cannot afford to allow these mods to exist for the time being. A developer known as “Botten Hanna” on Discord even went so far as to ask players to “pls do not” in regards to future attempts to mod lobby sizes in the game.
Currently, there isn’t any way to know whether or not the devs plan to remove this hard limit in the future. However, according to a Content Warning Discord moderator, they are planning to look into potentially removing the limit at some point. When and if that actually happens will depend on the continued popularity and revenue of the game, but it’s certainly promising to see the devs openly communicate and offer valid explanations for why they are cracking down on some mods and not others.
All of the signs are pointing to a future where party size mods are supported by Content Warning, but for now, even Thunderstore‘s best won’t be able to do anything about the limit. The good news is there are plenty of other great Content Warning mods already out there, and so long as they don’t attempt to increase the lobby limit in the game, it seems that you don’t have to worry about the devs trying to pull the rug.
