Civic Volunteer

Adds Civic, a fourth roster shift alongside Free / Sleep / Work. Assign Civic hours and your character walks the station repairing public infrastructure — not your own hull — to work off the Altruism discomfort.

StatAltruism drifts upward at a flat +8.33/hr in real time with no shift-based offset at all, and it has the worst satisfy-to-frustrate ratio of any need in the game. Left alone, a captain pins at Greedy with nothing to do about it but hand out cigarettes. This gives you the honest alternative: put in a shift.

Charity counts for more the less you stand to gain

The reward scales inversely with your standing with the station's faction. Repairing for people who dislike you is worth double what the same work is worth somewhere you're already Honored.

Faction standing rather than personal relationships, because the thing you're repairing is a station — there's nobody to have a relationship with.

Install

This mod is two parts, a plugin and a native data pack, and both install themselves. The one manual step is enabling the data pack in the game's MODS menu, which only the game itself is allowed to do.

1. Click Install in the Thunderstore Mod Manager (r2modman). BepInEx and the plugin are set up automatically.
2. Launch the game once. The plugin copies its data pack into Ostranauts_Data/Mods/ on startup and logs that it did.
3. From the main menu open MODS, enable Civic Volunteer, and restart.

If the data pack is missing anyway, the plugin says so in the log the first time a Civic shift starts, including exactly what to fix.

Using it

Set some hours to Civic in the Roster screen (click an hour cell to cycle through Free → Sleep → Work → Civic), then make sure that character has:

• AI Auto enabled
• Restore permission granted in the roster

Both are vanilla gates on the auto-task system — without them the character will stand around, and the log will tell you which one is missing.

Your character must also be aboard the station. The mod won't path you across a docking port; walk over yourself and the AI takes it from there.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.ostranauts.volunteer.cfg

• AltruismPerRepairAction (default 0.2) — altruism worked off per repair action, before the faction multiplier. Set 0 to pay only on completed repairs.

Uninstalling

Saves with Civic hours assigned expect the fourth shift to exist. Set those hours back to Free before uninstalling, or the save will error on load.