074 — PALINODE

SS danger · 1,250 credits · Version 0.3.0 — The Drowned Observatory

A city waits beneath an inverted ocean. Its observatory measures a tide that falls through living things. The main entrance is close. Getting the salvage back is another matter.

A rebuilt exterior

• A roughly 460 m square ground footprint, bounded by seawalls around a 430 m district.
• Central observatory with a monumental circular instrument, carved colonnades, detailed paving and amber refuges.
• Western two-tier aqueduct and pump halls; eastern freight quay with warehouses, cranes and cargo; a northern cloister and southern residential ruins.
• Walk-in building shells and connected roads. These outdoor structures are part of the moon, independent of the selected dungeon.
• Textured masonry, tiled streets, oxidised metal, drainage channels, kerbs, salt gardens and broken paving.
• Suspended buildings and moving rings beneath an inverted sea.
• Original Lethal Company main-entrance and fire-exit meshes and materials, loaded from your game at runtime.
• Four fire exits with distinct architecture: the landing pavilion, aqueduct pump station, freight signal house and northern cloister gate.
• Engraved landing compass, district directory, route signs and pavement markings.
• Observatory rose tracery, service conduits, railings, archive shelves and sealed folios inside the walk-in halls.
• Promenade lanterns, salt gardens, aqueduct pressure wheels, cloister votives and drifting sea phosphor.
• Refined sky illumination and cool fill lighting reveal the architectural detail while retaining the drowned district's dark atmosphere.

The exterior now starts preparing during level generation instead of waiting for touchdown. Construction and mesh batching are spread across frames, and outdoor navigation builds asynchronously, so the district can be ready while the ship is still landing. The tide's grace period still starts at touchdown. Actual loading time depends on your hardware and interior/modpack.

Close entrances, dangerous extraction

The main entrance is about 25 m ahead of the ship's ramp marker. Fire exit 01 remains about 15 m to the right. Exit 02 is beside the western aqueduct road, exit 03 beside the eastern freight quay, and exit 04 beyond the northern cloister. Each has its own generated interior counterpart, native door visual, interaction collider and arrival point. Follow the directory, red route markers and numbered signs. Extra exits offer alternate approaches and extraction routes across the district.

Negative tides start after the first 30% of the day. A bell and HUD warning give eight seconds to reach an amber-bordered refuge or the ship. Each cycle has 48 quiet seconds, eight warning seconds and 16 active seconds. Exposure has a short grace period, then deals 20 damage per second, rising to 25 late in the day.

The dungeon and ship interior are protected. Refuges stop tide damage but do not stop enemies. Dogs and giants provide additional outdoor danger. Architecture gives sightline breaks; keep listening when carrying scrap.

Loot and interiors

PALINODE requests 104–128 scrap pieces before the game's spawn modifiers, approximately four times the previous count. It uses Titan's ordinary item pool and rarity weights, without the previous 2.5× value boost or extra weighting for expensive items. There are more pieces to collect, with ordinary item-specific values: common finds can be around 50–60 credits, cheaper pieces remain cheaper, and occasional valuable finds remain possible. Values are not forced to a single number.

This increases the hauling workload and can increase the total available loot; it does not preserve an exact total value from the earlier release. Other mods, interior spawn points and game multipliers can change actual counts and values. Small interiors or items requiring specific spawn points may produce fewer pieces. No custom scrap is included. Existing scrap already saved aboard the ship keeps its value; the new balance applies to newly generated dungeon scrap.

Random_Interiors remains in control of dungeon selection. Enable PALINODE in its moon configuration if your settings exclude newly added moons. LethalLevelLoader requests four dungeon fire exits using the interior's standard fire-escape global prop. Custom interiors need enough supported exit locations to supply those four counterparts. PALINODE adds a separate terminal destination; Experimentation remains available.

Original soundtrack

Under the Inverted Sea is a new 2:08 instrumental ambient loop, composed for Palinode from synthesized pads, sparse bells and filtered ocean tones. It starts when the exterior is ready, including during landing, fades down indoors, and ducks beneath the tide warning bell. It stops with the moon scene. No music downloads are required.

Adjust SoundtrackVolume in BepInEx/config/local.palinode.moon.cfg from 0 to 1; the default is 0.24. Set it to 0 to mute the music. The soundtrack uses the game's music mixer routing.

Installation and updating

Install the Thunderstore package with your mod manager and its dependencies. When replacing the earlier local ZIP, remove the old PALINODE copy first so only one Palinode.dll is loaded. All players need the same version. Restart the game, then route using palinode.

Manual installation: put Palinode.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Palinode/.

Dependencies: BepInExPack 5.4.2305 and LethalLevelLoader 1.7.13, plus the loader's dependencies. Built against Lethal Company v81. No Unity editor is needed to play.

Compatibility

The 0.2.1 spectating fix is retained: Palinode's outdoor atmosphere and lights follow the watched player's interior state, including target changes and entrance/exit transitions. Outdoor fixed exposure is disabled when watching someone inside, allowing the interior's normal lighting and spectator night vision to work.

Built against the installed v81 game and checked with a real LAN host and separate client process. The final release passed 73 host checks and 13 client checks, including entry/return through every additional exit, remote-player location and interior state in both directions, all exterior navigation routes, early readiness, scrap balance, soundtrack controls and spectator lighting states. In-game exterior screenshots were reviewed. Longer multiplayer sessions and every custom interior/modpack combination remain unverified. Mods replacing Experimentation's exterior scene can conflict with the vanilla scene infrastructure used by PALINODE. Visual quality depends on the game's lighting and graphics settings.

The package contains no game assemblies, copied game assets or test harness. Vanilla door assets are referenced at runtime.

Removal

Route to another moon and save before removing PALINODE. Keep its dependencies if other installed mods need them.