Echolocation

Explore BONELAB through sound. Your view becomes black, and footsteps, microphone input, nearby game sounds and Fusion voices reveal surfaces as expanding, fading dots.

This is a Windows PCVR MelonLoader code mod. It also supports BONELAB's desktop view. It is not a standalone Quest/LemonLoader build.

Features

• Black echolocation-only vision in the headset and desktop view. Opening the game quick menu or BoneMenu temporarily restores normal vision so you can use the controls.
• Sound-driven surface raycasts for walking, landings, microphone input and locally audible game sounds.
• Orange exterior dots on identified sounding NPCs and props. Standard gunshot echoes start at the firing gun's muzzle and reveal its visible exterior.
• Optional Fusion integration. Audible remote voices produce violet echoes. A remote player's own detected sound reveals their silhouette: green with clear line of sight, red when obstructed. A faint proximity silhouette also shows quiet players within 2 m by default; players outside that radius need their own detected sound.
• A gentle double-clap gesture sends a brighter 360-degree pulse, with local sound feedback and an optional menu toggle.
• Hearing and reveal range controls up to 3000 m. Dot size adjusts down to 0.002 m in 0.001 m steps. Brighter dots default to 1.8x, with an adjustable brightness control.
• Automatic echoes use 9 cm dot-merging cells, bounded ray work and short fades to reduce overlapping walking trails.

Installation

1. Set up a working PCVR BONELAB installation with MelonLoader and BoneLib.
2. Install this package with a BONELAB-compatible mod manager, or copy Mods/Echolocation.dll from the ZIP into the game's Mods folder while BONELAB is closed.
3. Replace an older Echolocation DLL; keep only one installed copy.
4. Launch BONELAB, load a level and open BoneMenu > Echolocation.

Code mods go in the MelonLoader Mods folder, not the mod.io content-mod folder. The package includes only Echolocation; game and loader libraries are not bundled.

Getting started

Choose Send Pulse, then close the menu. Nearby walls, floors and objects should appear as cyan dots against black. Walk, speak or make a nearby game sound to produce more echoes.

Input	Echo color
Microphone and manual pulse	Cyan
Local footsteps and landings	Green
Nearby game sounds, NPCs, props and gunshots	Orange
Remote Fusion voices	Violet
Double-clap pulse	Bright cyan-white

Controls

All settings are under BoneMenu > Echolocation.

• Enabled: turn the entire mod on or off.
• Blackout (Echolocation Only): toggle the black view.
• Double Clap: 360 Pulse: enable or disable the gesture. With empty hands and the menu closed, bring your hands together twice, separating them between contacts. No minimum impact speed is required. Increase Clap Distance if the contacts are difficult to register.
• Clap and Pulse Sounds, Pulse Sound Volume and Test Pulse Sound: control and preview local feedback.
• Sound Inputs: choose microphone, walking, nearby game sounds and Fusion voice inputs. Keep Nearby Game Sounds enabled for NPC, prop and gunshot echoes.
• Game Sound Threshold: lower it to detect quieter sounds.
• Hearing Range: maximum distance for detected sound sources, up to 3000 m.
• Sonar Visuals: adjust reveal range, dot brightness, dot size, dot lifetime and ray limits. Set Both Ranges to 3000 m immediately updates hearing and reveal distance.
• Faint Nearby Players: enable or disable proximity silhouettes. Nearby Player Distance adjusts the radius from 0.5 to 4 m, default 2 m. These controls are under Sonar Visuals and require player highlights to be enabled.
• Dot Brightness: adjust from 0.25x to 3x, default 1.8x. Color and fade are preserved; final appearance depends on the game's display and postprocessing.
• Optimize Walking and Sound Echoes: keep this enabled for dot merging, short automatic fades and bounded automatic work.

Hold both index triggers for 1.5 seconds with empty hands to toggle blackout. Release before repeating. Desktop shortcuts are F5 for a pulse and F6 to toggle the mod, if desktop hotkeys are enabled.

Settings are saved in the active installation or mod-manager profile's UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg.

Fresh installs start with 3000 m hearing and reveal ranges. Existing settings at the former 200 m maximum upgrade once on launch; lower custom ranges and later adjustments are preserved.

Fusion

Fusion is optional. Install it separately if you want multiplayer. Echolocation effects run locally; other players do not need this mod for you to see echoes. It creates no custom networked objects and sends no additional audio or network messages.

When Fusion is installed, microphone detection uses Fusion's existing voice-chat input. Join a session and enable voice chat. Mute, deafen, voice activation and push-to-talk affect detection. Without Fusion, the mod can use a Unity microphone device; it leaves an already-recording device alone. Microphone samples are processed in memory and are not recorded to files or transmitted by Echolocation.

A remote player's own detected sound produces the stronger silhouette, fading within 0.5 seconds of their last detected sound. Your movement, speech and deliberate pulses do not refresh someone else's sound window. Separately, Faint Nearby Players keeps a subtle distance-faded silhouette inside the proximity radius even while the person is quiet. It disappears outside that radius unless their sound is still detected. Disable the proximity toggle for entirely sound-driven player reveals. Gun and prop ownership does not infer the identity of a nearby player.

Version 1.7.6 corrects the scale and placement of baked avatar silhouettes. It also checks snapshot bounds before drawing: a malformed or greatly displaced snapshot is omitted instead of covering your view. The check follows each avatar renderer's actual size, so it does not force large avatars to human size. Unusual poses that extend well outside an avatar's configured renderer bounds can be omitted too; a throttled mod-log message reports that condition.

The included 1.7.7 corrections improve missing speaking avatars. Remote detection follows voice audio currently playing, even when the newest Fusion packet is quiet. Failed voice sources retry independently. More active mesh parts, higher-detail meshes and additional material slots can render within bounded work. Hearing range follows tracked head coordinates. If no safe avatar mesh can be drawn, a small green/red diamond marks the tracked head during an eligible sound or proximity reveal. Silent and muted audio never creates a sound reveal.

Performance and limitations

With automatic optimization enabled, each automatic pulse uses at most 512 rays and all automatic scans share a 256-ray frame budget. Automatic dots fade within 0.85 seconds. Repeated hits refresh existing dots. Manual and double-clap scans keep their separate detail and longer fades within the configured overall limits.

The renderer samples physical colliders. Decorative meshes without colliders do not produce returns, and walls block ordinary surface dots. Red player silhouettes intentionally remain visible through obstacles. The 9 cm merging cell is not a guaranteed distance between visible dots: positions come from actual raycast hits.

Sound detection requires locally playing, audible output. Very short sounds can be missed between checks. Increasing hearing range does not make muted or inaudible sounds detectable. The inspected Fusion build applies its own voice cutoff based on avatar height, approximately 33 m for an ordinary-height avatar; a 3000 m Echolocation setting does not change that cutoff. World audio retains its own attenuation and playback limits.

A larger reveal range spreads the same rays over more space; distant returns are sparser. Wave speed scales with range so the outer radius is reached within 1.25 seconds, followed by the normal fade. Physical colliders must be loaded, and actual visible distance remains subject to the game's cameras and clipping planes. Ray, dot and avatar budgets remain bounded.

Standard BONELAB gun audio supplies the muzzle mapping. Custom weapons with another audio implementation fall back to their sound-source position. Special camera compositors, custom avatars, game updates and other mods can require compatibility adjustments.

If performance drops, keep automatic optimization enabled and reduce the overall ray budget, ray count or stored-dot limit. Test settings on the same map and lobby when comparing performance.

Release notes

Version 1.8.0 adds faint nearby silhouettes, 3000 m range controls and brighter dots, including the earlier avatar and voice fixes. It remains an optimized Release build with neutral mod metadata and no debug symbols. See CHANGELOG.md for recent changes.