Beyond The Wall 0.3.0

Built from Brian's confirmed-working v0.1.36 Big Walk ARG mod. Local visual encounters; this does not synchronize entities or progression to other players. Other people need their own installation to see their own encounters.

Introduction

The White One appears at grounded, unobstructed positions approximately 28–52 metres ahead, for exactly 12 game-time seconds. Very rare elevated sightings are possible. Both figures now use snapshots of real player-model meshes. White is colored white at normal proportions; Black is colored black, stretched to 185% height and 68% width/depth. Only mesh renderers are copied, never player/network scripts, physics, audio or controls. They keep the sampled pose instead of running a player animation controller. If a complete mesh is not ready, the encounter skips/retries instead of showing the old primitive stand-in. Neither attacks. No sudden sound effects or screen jumpscares are added.

First natural encounter is scheduled 45–100 seconds after gameplay detection. Later White encounters have 75–210 seconds between them. After two noticed White sightings, there is a 30% chance of a Black follow-up after each White. Black encounters last 5–8 seconds. Failed placement retries safely instead of leaving an entity floating over missing ground.

Progression

A natural White or Black encounter counts once only after its upper body has remained in the central part of the camera view, with an unobstructed raycast, for 0.75 seconds. Debug spawns do not count. This is a visibility approximation, not eye tracking.

• Six noticed encounters, with at least two White and two Black, unlock the Third Bell.
• The Third Bell is a new enormous, stationary bell silhouette built from procedural geometry, placed 150–240 metres away at a valid ground position. Looking at it for one unobstructed second counts its discovery.
• Twelve noticed White/Black encounters plus discovery of the Third Bell unlock the One Beyond The Wall's cloak reveal.
• The One Beyond The Wall exists at a fixed position before it becomes visible. After unlocking, its huge procedural silhouette appears when its direction aligns within roughly ten degrees of the actual sunlight direction, with the sun above the horizon. It never relocates to follow the camera. Uses RenderSettings.sun, or an active directional light when available. Once unlocked, the vanilla item finder/X-ray effect also reveals it clearly, without sun alignment. The finder reveal uses an unlit depth-independent material when UI/Default is available; deactivating the finder or entering its vanilla dead zone restores the normal cloak/sun rules. The item finder uses PeckEffectPropXRay.activeEffect rather than a keyboard shortcut or merely holding an item.

The late entities use an initial procedural visual design, not imported custom creature assets. No new Bell destruction mechanic is implemented. The two vanilla Bells are neither replaced nor modified, and Bell destruction never gates this progression.

Progress saves beside the plugin as BeyondTheWall.progress.txt, across game sessions and worlds for this local installation. The format is white-count,black-count,bell-seen. To restart progression, close the game and remove that one save file. Malformed saves are ignored. File-write problems are logged without stopping encounters.

Controls

6 / numpad 6 opens or closes debug information. While open, 1 spawns White and 2 spawns Black nearby for 12 seconds. Test spawns do not unlock later stages. Input is ignored while Big Walk is unfocused. The menu displays natural sighting counts and unlock state.

Build, install, and validation

build.ps1 now uses the local .NET SDK and compiles directly against the installed Big Walk IL2CPP interop/loader assemblies. The old stub references are unused. Install ONLY BeyondTheWall.dll; do not install reference assemblies or duplicate the plugin GUID.

Build and runtime-member verification pass, along with 20 progression/save checks and presentation-rule checks. Backups are outside the plugins directory. Existing progression is preserved. No in-game visual playtest has been performed for 0.3.0: use debug 6 then 1/2 to check model appearance; later encounters retain normal progression requirements. Multiplayer encounters remain local, not synchronized.