Spray guests, get ten positive reactions
"Spread Love with Water Gun 0/10" asks you to spray park guests with the water gun until ten of them react positively. That is the whole task: it is a progression objective from the mission flow, not a Steam achievement, and it does not involve the Taser that a similarly named energy task uses. On the current PC and PS5 builds the counter works, and this page reflects the state after the August 2026 fixes; older guides describing it as permanently stuck are describing the launch-window bug, not the present game.
The task earned its search volume because on PS5 at launch it genuinely could not be completed, which turned a simple spray task into a progression wall. The cause and the fix are both on the record from the developers, so this page separates what the task asks from what the bug did.
Get the water gun first
The water gun comes from research. Community guides place it in the attractions area of the research tree, following the hot-dog-stand line, with one written guide noting it can be researched after your park reaches one star for a single research point. After the research completes, take the gun from the board next to the research table rather than expecting it in an inventory menu. If you cannot research it yet, your park stars or research points are the limiting factor, and the research-points page covers accumulating them faster.
Exact tree labels differ across patches, so treat the branch description here as orientation and read your own research screen. The gun itself is the same one used for fun around the park; the task only cares that guests react well to being sprayed.
Counting all ten reliably
Spray a guest two or three times and watch for the positive reaction to register one count. Reports agree that certain guests are easier credits: angry or sad guests with the red bubble above their head, the cheaters you can spray right before kicking them out, and the "dirty" guests trailing a green stink cloud, who can double-dip with the separate clean-smelly-guests tasks. Angry guests are the standard recommendation because parks always have some.
Do not spread the sprays thinly across the whole park hoping quantity helps; the counter wants positive reactions, not total shots. Work the queue lines and mid-park crowds where guests cluster, re-spray anyone who does not react, and the count reaches ten in a few minutes on a normal day. A single report claims throwing water balloons also works; without confirmation it stays Pending verification.
Why PS5 players got stuck at launch
The PS5 soft-lock was a developer-acknowledged bug with a stated cause. In the official console-situation post of August 2026, CayPlay explained that a last-minute change made to comply with Sony's rules had broken Spread Love progression on PS5, soft-locking players mid-mission. The same post noted that players on Easy difficulty were unaffected, which matched player reports and became the temporary play-around.
The sequence that followed was messy but documented: a first PS5 patch claimed the fix, players still reported being stuck, and a follow-up water-gun patch briefly made the gun unobtainable on PS5 until a hotfix restored it. The reliable fix arrived with the PS5 hotfix in late August 2026, announced in the developer post "The PS5 hotfix is now live," which also repaired old trash reappearing after save reloads.
Since then, an experimental difficulty system introduced in the 1.0.44 build was described by the developers as preventing all known cases of Spread Love blocking progression, and PC received its own fix for one non-progressing case shortly after the 1.0.28.1 build. Whether Xbox ever suffered the bug is unrecorded, because the cause was PlayStation-specific; Xbox status stays Pending verification.
If it still does not count on your save
Start by checking the difficulty you are on and updating the game, because every known blocker traces to specific old builds. Confirm you are spraying until the positive reaction animation plays, not just hitting guests with water. Then check that the task text on screen is actually "Spread Love with Water Gun" and not the energy task that uses the Taser; the two get confused constantly in searches.
If the counter genuinely refuses to move on a fully updated build, capture your platform, version, difficulty, and a short clip, and report it through the community channels the developers monitor. Do not delete your save; nothing in the documented fixes required one, and the difficulty system rework was aimed precisely at making those stuck states recoverable.
The Spread Love story is the clearest example of why this wiki dates its claims. Within four weeks the task went from broken, to falsely fixed, to newly broken in a different way, to genuinely fixed, and each stage produced its own wave of posts. A guide written during any single stage describes only that stage. When you read a Spread Love thread or video, check its date against this timeline before trusting its conclusion, because the advice "switch to Easy" was correct in August 2026 and is unnecessary on current builds.
The developer posts are also the reason the cause is known at all. CayPlay named the Sony-compliance change directly rather than shipping a silent patch, which let players separate the PS5 platform issue from the task itself. That distinction matters for Xbox and PC players reading scary old threads: the soft-lock was never reported as a cross-platform task fault, and PC's separate counting case was fixed on its own timeline.
What remains genuinely open is narrow. The water-balloon alternative rests on one report. Xbox's historical exposure is unrecorded. And the 1.0.44 difficulty rework is labeled experimental by its own description, so its long-term behavior deserves the usual wait-and-verify treatment this site applies to new systems.
Teaching the task to co-op guests
In multiplayer parks, Spread Love behaves like other progression: the task lives with the park, and reports describe any player's spray counts registering toward shared objectives. If a friend is visiting your park while the task is active, telling them the counting rule saves everyone time, because a guest spraying randomly for fun produces fewer counts than one working the angry-guest queue lines.
Co-op also adds a failure mode of its own: guests can soak each other instead of the visitors, producing plenty of water and zero progress. A one-line reminder that the counter wants positive reactions from park guests prevents the most common wasted minutes. None of this requires the host to do the task alone; it just requires everyone to know what the counter is actually counting.
If the task will not progress in co-op on a current build, test it once in single-player before reporting, because that single test separates a genuine bug from a session-specific sync problem and makes any report dramatically more useful.
Where this task sits
Spread Love belongs to the mission flow that also contains the energy task with its own page, and both feed the objectives that drive park progression. Console players tracking other launch issues should read the console fixes page, and PS5-specific status lives on the PS5 page. For the overall objectives map, the quests page remains the hub.