FATE Quick Spell

Direction-based spell wheel for FATE: Reawakened. Hold the wheel key, flick the mouse towards the spell you want, let go: that spell becomes active. Nothing is clicked, and no cursor is shown while the wheel is up.

The game's wheel is left exactly as it is: no slot is moved, resized or added, the icons stay where the game drew them, and the mod adds no entry of its own to any menu. Only the way a spell is picked changes.

By MikhailKillsZombies. Standalone Windows BepInEx 5 plugin. MIT license.

Install and remove

Import the Thunderstore ZIP as a local mod in your FATE: Reawakened r2modman profile, or merge its BepInEx folder beside the game EXE. Install BepInExPack first. Launch modded.

Uninstall through the manager, or remove only BepInEx/plugins/FATEQuickSpell/mikhailkillszombies.FateQuickSpell.dll. The config at BepInEx/config/mikhailkillszombies.fate.quickspell.cfg does not load any code; the vanilla wheel returns on the next launch.

The wheel

The game's own wheel waits for you to move the cursor onto a slot and click it. This mod replaces that with a direction:

• Hold the spell wheel key as usual. The wheel opens, the game's arrow is hidden and the operating-system pointer is hidden and pinned to the middle of the screen.
• Flick the mouse towards a slot. The highlighted slot is the one lying in the direction the mouse is moving — the direction of the last movement, not where a cursor sits. A short travel memory (about a quarter second) means the pick follows what you are doing now, and it survives the pointer reaching a window edge because the pointer is put back in the middle each frame.
• Release the key. The highlighted spell is activated, exactly as if its slot had been clicked. The pointer reappears where it was before the wheel opened.
• Release without flicking and nothing changes: the wheel opens on the spell that is already active.
• Empty slots cannot be picked. Aiming at one keeps the previous selection.
• A controller keeps the game's own wheel. With a game pad the game already picks from the stick, so this mod stays out of it entirely.
• Only a release picks a spell. Closing the wheel any other way — a menu, death, a scene change, alt-tabbing away — restores the pointer and changes nothing.

The wheel's own highlights are used, so the selected slot lights up exactly as it does for a hover or a game pad.

Settings

BepInEx/config/mikhailkillszombies.fate.quickspell.cfg, also editable in r2modman's config editor:

Setting	Default	Meaning
General.Enabled	true	Turns the whole mod off without uninstalling; the game's own click-to-select wheel returns.
Wheel.FlickPixels	28	How far the mouse must travel, in pixels, before a direction is chosen. Lower picks a spell sooner; higher needs a more deliberate flick.
Wheel.Diagnostics	true	Logs each hold, each highlight and the spell that was picked. Turn off once it works.

If the wheel does not change

The mod says what it is doing in BepInEx/LogOutput.log, so a hold can be followed step by step:

Line	Meaning
driver running.	The per-frame part is alive. Without it the mod still picks, but it cannot notice a wheel closed by something other than the key.
driver attached.	The driver was created, or put back after a scene load.
a controller is connected; the mod stays out of the wheel.	A game pad is plugged in, so the mod leaves the game's own stick wheel alone.
wheel key held with the mod switched off.	General.Enabled is false.
wheel: travel=…px needs …, slots=…, spells=…	The hold is live and the flick is being measured (logged twice a second with Diagnostics on).
Spell wheel: slot N (…).	A slot was picked; releasing commits it.
FATE Aiming found: its cursor handling stands down while the wheel is held (4 hooks).	FATE Aiming is installed and will not hand the cursor back during a hold.
FATE Aiming is not installed; the wheel hides the cursor on its own.	Nothing else touches the cursor, so the mod hides it alone.

Known limits

• The pick needs a direction, so a pure click on a slot no longer picks anything while the mod is on; turn General.Enabled off for the vanilla wheel.
• Slots are matched to the directions they are drawn in, so the mod follows the wheel wherever the game puts the icons, but an empty slot in the direction you aimed at blocks that direction rather than falling through to the next one.
• The wheel holds the game's own six spells; the mod does not add slots.
• Aiming is not needed; the mod works with or without FATE Aiming installed. When FATE Aiming is present, its cursor handling stands down for as long as the wheel is held, so the pointer stays hidden instead of being handed back when Aiming suspends itself for a menu; with Aiming absent or idle, nothing about the cursor changes.