u/nenadjokic

TL;DR: Under CrossOver/Wine on macOS, Windrose plays single player and your own hosted world fine, but joining a friend (or a friend joining you) hangs forever on LOADING. The cause: Windrose's P2P (ICE) resolves your Mac's own hostname to gather local candidates, Wine asks the macOS resolver, and macOS cannot resolve the bare hostname. Fix: add your machine's hostname to /etc/hosts pointing at 127.0.0.1. No game files touched, survives reboots.

Symptoms

• Single player: works.
• Hosting + entering your own world: works (this is just local loopback, so it is misleading).
• Joining a friend, or a friend joining you: infinite LOADING, often hard-freezes the game so you must force-quit.
• Works on Steam Deck (Proton) and GeForce Now, so the game and account are fine. The issue is specific to CrossOver/Wine on macOS.

Why it happens Windrose does not use Steam networking. It has its own ICE P2P stack (STUN/TURN via coturn-*.windrose.support, matchmaking via r5coopapigateway-*.windrose.support). The first P2P step, "gather local ICE candidates" (R5IceConnection::GatherAllAddresses), resolves your computer's own hostname. Under Wine that lookup is delegated to macOS, which does not resolve your Mac's bare hostname by default, so the log shows, instantly:

GatherAllAddresses  Cannot resolve addresses for host YOUR-HOSTNAME. Status message Host not found.
OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished  Local ICE candidates received. IsOk false
ConnectToServer is broken. ErrorMessage 'Cannot connect to P2P server'

The fix

1. Find the hostname from your log:

   grep -i "Cannot resolve addresses for host"
   ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles//drive_c/users/crossover/AppData/Local/R5/Saved/Logs/R5.log
   | sed -E 's/.for host ([^.])../\1/' | sort -u hostname; scutil --get LocalHostName

(The name can change between CrossOver restarts, so add every variant.)

2. Add them to /etc/hosts:

   sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add a line like:

127.0.0.1   your-hostname your-other-hostname-variant

Then flush the cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

3. Verify: ping -c1 your-hostname should resolve to 127.0.0.1. No game restart needed.

After the fix the log shows OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished ... IsOk true and then LogNet: Welcomed by server. No more hang. 127.0.0.1 is correct because Windrose tunnels the real traffic through the TURN relay, so loopback + relay is the working combo (no port forwarding needed).

Bonus: if you also run a VPN (e.g. Tailscale) or have multiple interfaces on the same subnet, ICE gathering can choke on enumerating them. The /etc/hosts fix usually makes this moot, but if needed, temporarily reduce to a single active interface to test.

Environment: macOS (Apple Silicon), CrossOver 26.1, Steam bottle, Windrose 0.10.0.

TL;DR: Under CrossOver/Wine on macOS, Windrose plays single player and your own hosted world fine, but joining a friend (or a friend joining you) hangs forever on LOADING. The cause: Windrose's P2P (ICE) resolves your Mac's own hostname to gather local candidates, Wine asks the macOS resolver, and macOS cannot resolve the bare hostname. Fix: add your machine's hostname to /etc/hosts pointing at 127.0.0.1. No game files touched, survives reboots.

Symptoms

• Single player: works.
• Hosting + entering your own world: works (this is just local loopback, so it is misleading).
• Joining a friend, or a friend joining you: infinite LOADING, often hard-freezes the game so you must force-quit.
• Works on Steam Deck (Proton) and GeForce Now, so the game and account are fine. The issue is specific to CrossOver/Wine on macOS.

Why it happens Windrose does not use Steam networking. It has its own ICE P2P stack (STUN/TURN via coturn-*.windrose.support, matchmaking via r5coopapigateway-*.windrose.support). The first P2P step, "gather local ICE candidates" (R5IceConnection::GatherAllAddresses), resolves your computer's own hostname. Under Wine that lookup is delegated to macOS, which does not resolve your Mac's bare hostname by default, so the log shows, instantly:

GatherAllAddresses  Cannot resolve addresses for host YOUR-HOSTNAME. Status message Host not found.
OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished  Local ICE candidates received. IsOk false
ConnectToServer is broken. ErrorMessage 'Cannot connect to P2P server'

The fix

1. Find the hostname from your log:

   grep -i "Cannot resolve addresses for host"
   ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles//drive_c/users/crossover/AppData/Local/R5/Saved/Logs/R5.log
   | sed -E 's/.for host ([^.])../\1/' | sort -u hostname; scutil --get LocalHostName

(The name can change between CrossOver restarts, so add every variant.)

2. Add them to /etc/hosts:

   sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add a line like:

127.0.0.1   your-hostname your-other-hostname-variant

Then flush the cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

3. Verify: ping -c1 your-hostname should resolve to 127.0.0.1. No game restart needed.

After the fix the log shows OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished ... IsOk true and then LogNet: Welcomed by server. No more hang. 127.0.0.1 is correct because Windrose tunnels the real traffic through the TURN relay, so loopback + relay is the working combo (no port forwarding needed).

Bonus: if you also run a VPN (e.g. Tailscale) or have multiple interfaces on the same subnet, ICE gathering can choke on enumerating them. The /etc/hosts fix usually makes this moot, but if needed, temporarily reduce to a single active interface to test.

Environment: macOS (Apple Silicon), CrossOver 26.1, Steam bottle, Windrose 0.10.0.

TL;DR: Under CrossOver/Wine on macOS, Windrose plays single player and your own hosted world fine, but joining a friend (or a friend joining you) hangs forever on LOADING. The cause: Windrose's P2P (ICE) resolves your Mac's own hostname to gather local candidates, Wine asks the macOS resolver, and macOS cannot resolve the bare hostname. Fix: add your machine's hostname to /etc/hosts pointing at 127.0.0.1. No game files touched, survives reboots.

Symptoms

• Single player: works.
• Hosting + entering your own world: works (this is just local loopback, so it is misleading).
• Joining a friend, or a friend joining you: infinite LOADING, often hard-freezes the game so you must force-quit.
• Works on Steam Deck (Proton) and GeForce Now, so the game and account are fine. The issue is specific to CrossOver/Wine on macOS.

Why it happens Windrose does not use Steam networking. It has its own ICE P2P stack (STUN/TURN via coturn-*.windrose.support, matchmaking via r5coopapigateway-*.windrose.support). The first P2P step, "gather local ICE candidates" (R5IceConnection::GatherAllAddresses), resolves your computer's own hostname. Under Wine that lookup is delegated to macOS, which does not resolve your Mac's bare hostname by default, so the log shows, instantly:

GatherAllAddresses  Cannot resolve addresses for host YOUR-HOSTNAME. Status message Host not found.
OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished  Local ICE candidates received. IsOk false
ConnectToServer is broken. ErrorMessage 'Cannot connect to P2P server'

The fix

1. Find the hostname from your log:

   grep -i "Cannot resolve addresses for host"
   ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles//drive_c/users/crossover/AppData/Local/R5/Saved/Logs/R5.log
   | sed -E 's/.for host ([^.])../\1/' | sort -u hostname; scutil --get LocalHostName

(The name can change between CrossOver restarts, so add every variant.)

2. Add them to /etc/hosts:

   sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add a line like:

127.0.0.1   your-hostname your-other-hostname-variant

Then flush the cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

3. Verify: ping -c1 your-hostname should resolve to 127.0.0.1. No game restart needed.

After the fix the log shows OnLocalIceCandidatesFinished ... IsOk true and then LogNet: Welcomed by server. No more hang. 127.0.0.1 is correct because Windrose tunnels the real traffic through the TURN relay, so loopback + relay is the working combo (no port forwarding needed).

Bonus: if you also run a VPN (e.g. Tailscale) or have multiple interfaces on the same subnet, ICE gathering can choke on enumerating them. The /etc/hosts fix usually makes this moot, but if needed, temporarily reduce to a single active interface to test.

Environment: macOS (Apple Silicon), CrossOver 26.1, Steam bottle, Windrose 0.10.0.