Who Needs the Mod?

For certain features as a client, only the host is required to have the mod to access them!

• More Scouts, Start Kiosk Lock, Banning, ect.

To benefit from other features and fixes as a client, you must get the mod yourself!

• Miscellaneous fixes for having More Scouts, Blindness bug fix, side mouse buttons for scrolling, ect.

You can benefit from all of the client side fixes without the host having the mod!

• Ex. The host may use another scout capacity increasing mod like PEAK Unlimited, and you'll benefit from all of the More Scouts fixes!

Most features and fixes are annotated with (Host) or (Client) if it may be unclear who the given thing is for!

More Scouts (Host)

The maximum number of scouts that may join your expeditions has been increased to 20! This is configurable from 1-20.

• The physics-based ragdoll characters does lead to a lot of CPU-bound lag around 15-20 scouts, even on the most performant of cpus.
• Having more scouts in a lobby may lead to some desync, general lobby instability, and sometimes lobby crashes. When reviving lots of scouts at once at the statue, most of the scouts in the lobby may disconnect.
• The increased networking required to handle this many scouts does cost the developers a little extra, so because of these issues and the extra cost involved, I put a hard cap on the maximum scouts with my mod.
  • Though the developers seem to allow up to 30 scouts in a Photon room, the game is unstable enough as it is at 20 scouts to really warrant me increasing the limit.

Several patches have been made to improve the experience with so many scouts!

• (Host) There is a marshmallow for everyone at each campfire!
• (Client) Everyone will now have a volume slider in the pause menu! (Currently goes below the screen if there's too many, haha.)
• (Client) Usernames above scout's heads will no longer be wrong or missing!
• (Client) The end cutscene now shows every surviving scout in the helicopter! (It looks cramped, and that's because it is. How else am I meant to fit them all? xD)
• (Client) The end screen now supports the increased number of scouts! (The list of scout's altitudes does look a bit janky, but it's the best I can do for now, without changing the whole GUI.)
• (Client) Exceptions should no longer be thrown when other clients are using modded colors, skins, ect that you do not have.
• (Client) The number of scouts in the expedition, and the maximum number that may join, is now displayed in the top left, next to the game's version.
• (Client) Whenever the leader of the expedition changes (be it them leaving or a cheater forcefully taking over) you will see who the new owner is in the connection log in the top left.
  • (Host) If you used to be the leader, then you will fight to gain it back!

Do note that the game is not designed to handle so many scouts! For example, when reviving lots of scouts at the revival statues, there is the possibility of most of the scouts disconnecting due to the Photon error "ServerSendBufferFull".

• This error is not directly related to the revival statues, it is just often triggered by it.
  • To try and combat this, I delay the respawning of each scout by 1 frame. I cannot confirm or deny if this improves the issue.
• Some RPCs are 'buffered', meaning they will be added to a buffer on the Photon server and called when new scouts join the expedition.
• If this buffer gets too full, the Photon server seems to disconnect scouts with the above error until it empties the buffer enough to continue as normal.

Airport Start Kiosk Lock (Host)

The Airport Start Kiosk is now locked, so only the host may start the expedition by default!

• This lock can be toggled with the F1 key, but is configurable.
• When toggling the lock, you will be notified of the lock's state in the connection log in the top left.

Steam Lobby Lock (Host)

The Steam Lobby may now be locked via the F8 key toggle, which is configurable!

• While the Steam Lobby is locked, no scouts will be able to join. Useful if you've started your expedition and don't want anyone joining in the middle of it, which may cause desync issues and other bugs!
  • If scouts already in your expedition disconnect, they will not be able to rejoin unless you unlock the Steam Lobby!
• When toggling the lock, you will be notified of the lock's state in the connection log in the top left.

Several Fixes & Improvements

• (Client) Any time you experience pass-out induced blindness, meaning you pass out or wake up and the black fade effect doesn't disappear, leading to a completely black screen, you may forcefully hide it with F2, which is configurable.
• (Host) Any time you are unable to light a campfire, be it a bug or a cheater breaking it, or someone being afk and out of range of it, you may forcefully light it via F3, which is configurable.
  • This will not bring scouts outside the range within range. Scouts may miss the morale boost or fall out of the world when the previous section is unloaded.
• (Host) If a backpack goes missing, is deleted by a cheater, or you'd just like for there to be more than a maximum of 4 backpacks, you may spawn one via F4, which is configurable.
  • There are some patches aimed at preventing this bug from occurring, and preventing cheaters from breaking the campfire.
• (Host) If at the ending screen someone is afk or just refusing to click Next, you may forcefully skip it via F5, which is also configurable.
• (Client) You may use your side mouse buttons as your scroll wheel, the rate of scrolling is increased while holding Left Shift.
  • This is more for me, since my scroll wheel is busted, but it may be useful for others!

Cheater Detection (Client, Using the Connection Log)

• If a scout joins your lobby using the Atlas or Cherry mods, you will be constantly notified every 10 seconds of their presence.
  • I haven't met many Atlas nor Cherry users in my dozens of lobbies who didn't use their mods to cheat, ruin the experience, or otherwise crash the lobby.
• When a cheater intentionally tries to break a campfire, which would soft-lock your expedition, you will be notified.
• Any time someone kills or revives a scout, you will be notified. (Revivals using the Scout Effigy are flagged, so watch out for that.)
• When a cheater attaches a tick to another scout to another player, you will be notified.
• If a cheater spawns (instantiates) a networked object they shouldn't be able to spawn normally.

Logging (Client, Can be a Cheater Detection+ if you know how to use it)

• All of the above cheater detections are logged.

• Any time you call a Buffered RPC. (These seem to be the reason larger expeditions crash when a lot of scouts revive at once using the statue, this is mostly for debugging the cause.) To try and combat these crashes slightly, your calls to...:

  • ...RespawnChest.RemoveSkeletonRPC will no longer be buffered, since this RPC doesn't seem that important, and is called when the respawn statue is used.
  • ...PlayerGhost.RPCA_SetTarget will clear the buffer of calls to it beforehand, because the previous targets don't matter.
  • ...RespawnChest.RespawnAllPlayersHere will clear the buffer of calls to CharacterCustomization.OnRevive_RPC, CharacterCustomization.CharacterDied, and CharacterCustomization.CharacterPassedOut beforehand, because the previous calls don't matter.

• Steam Lobby chat messages, allowing you to see a list of everyone playing at a certain time.

  • Includes SteamIDs and the user's Steam name.

• Any object being instantiated, and by which scout.

  • Careful with this, since it does trigger every time someone pulls an item out of their inventory into their hands, or when they put something in a backpack.

Banning (Host, More like a Denylist)

You may prevent anyone by SteamID from joining your expeditions.

• There may be a slight chance banned users may be able to get around this, depending on if a bunch of people join the expedition in a certain order, but I have not experienced this myself.
• Other than that, the only way to get around this ban would be for them to get another copy of the game on another Steam account (or a friend), which you can then also promptly ban.

This DOES NOT disconnect them if you ban them while they're already in your expedition, only preventing them from joining your expeditions in the future. You either have to get them to leave peacefully (usually unlikely), or abandon ship and start another expedition.

• Neither Photon (the backend used for the game's networking) nor do the developers currently provide a way to disconnect or kick scouts from your lobbies.
• To disconnect someone would require flooding them with garbage packets, forcing them to disconnect, which is literally the definition of a Denial of Service attack. Ban Mods have been taken off of Thunderstore in the past for doing exactly this!
  • In fact, on top of doing so being illegal, it actually costs the developers of the game (and Photon) more money, so please don't do this!

The Scout Lists (Client, Quick Banning)

You may open two Scout Lists via F9, which is configurable. This will show all scouts in your Photon room on the left, and all the Steam users in your Steam lobby on the right. You should open the pause menu to best interact with the scout lists.

• I show both because a scout's Photon nickname may not be the same as their Steam name (whether because you have an old Steam name cached for them, or they modified it with a mod), and they won't appear in the same order in both lists, so you can compare the lists to tell who is who. My logging uses Photon names, since it's through Photon cheaters do their cheating, so you have to compare their Photon name to the Steam names to identify them.

On the right scout list, every user will have a Ban button next to their SteamID and name, which you can use to quickly ban them. Keep in mind this won't disconnect them, just prevent them from coming back.

Managing Bans

All banned SteamIDs, their Steam name, and a reason are stored at the root of your BepInEx folder in a banned.txt in the following format, one line per banned scout:

• {SteamID} | {Steam Name} | {Reason}
• Only the first | after the SteamID matters, but I prefer the file being formatted this way.
  • You may also add as many spaces around the |'s as you want, I'll trim out the excess when parsing.

You may modify the banned.txt file however you wish, adding and removing banned users from it, adding comments if that helps, ect.

• I safely parse this file, so no incorrect input should cause any errors, but it won't properly ban a user if the line is incorrectly formatted.

The list of banned users is reloaded from this file every time you launch the game, or press the key to toggle the scout lists.

• Every time the ban list is reloaded, you will be able see the parsed list of banned users get logged. You can use this to check if all the users you want banned from your expeditions are being added to the list properly.

Witch Hunting or Public Shaming (Sharing the banned.txt)

I would not like to initiate any sort or form of a witch hunt, nor do I want to publicly shame anyone, so I will not be sharing my banned.txt or putting it anywhere publicly, and I'd hope that nobody else would either.

• Though I feel confident most people would agree that most of the people I have banned should be banned from their public lobbies, not everyone will, and I'd rather not deal with the drama associated with managing a public ban list. I just wanna play the game.

If your friends have been hosting with this mod a while, maybe you can ask them for their ban list to get a head start. Otherwise, just start hosting and ban those you don't want in your lobbies when they come around, and if neccessary, just quit and host another expedition where they won't be able to join back. You'll quickly accumulate a list of banned scouts of your own and start having a good time climbing PEAKs again.

How the Ban Works (Simplified)

• When someone first tries to join your expedition, they first join your Steam lobby.
• They'll then ask you for a Photon room name, so that they may enter the expedition.
• So long as a banned person's SteamID is present in your Steam lobby (unless they are ignored), you will send a completely random, incorrect Photon room name in response.
• People will then try joining this Photon room of the incorrect name, are unable to do so, and promptly disconnect from your Steam lobby.

W.I.P!

This mod is still semi-experimental, so there may be a few issues! There's actually some minor ones I already know about. So, until I'm satisfied with the state of the mod, I won't be releasing a 1.0.0 version of the mod to reflect the mod's unfinished state!

Here are some things I'd (potentially) like to work on before then, in no particular order:

• Fixing the volume sliders for scouts going off the screen in larger lobbies. (Preferably with a scroll view.)
• Maybe, but unlikely, make the list scout's altitudes not cover the trendline in the end screen.
• Scalable marshmallow multiplier config option? (20 may not be enough for 20 scouts, so maybe allow multiplying by 1.5 to spawn 30?)
• More backpacks, scaling with the number of scouts, configurable? (Normally with 20 scouts, only 4 of them will ever get a backpack, that is if those with backpacks don't lose them.)
• Possibly fixing crashes related to using too many Buffered RPCs? (Mostly with the revival statue.)
• A key toggle or config option to wait to revive all dead scouts until all living scouts are near the top of the mountain.
• Improving the Scout Lists GUI, maybe adding a GUI for the banned scouts?
• Better and more cheating/modding detections. (I won't implement automatic bans, just more logging and notices in the connection log.)
• Make the manual fixes (fixing pass-out blindness, igniting broken campfires, ect) not necessary, by making the issues fix themselves automatically, or even preventing the issues in the first place.
• Other minor improvements around the codebase, consistency and such.

If you encounter any issues, have any suggestions, or would like to offer help, I am in the PEAK Modding Discord!

Installation (Manual)

1. Download BepInEx if you don't already have it installed. If you do, skip to step 4.
2. Extract the contents of BepInEx_win_x64_5.4.23.3.zip into your game's root directory.
   • You may navigate there directly by: opening your Steam library, right clicking them game, selecting Manage, and then Browse local files.
3. Run the game once, wait for the game's window to appear, then you may close the game.
4. Download the latest release of this mod, or whichever one you'd prefer.
5. Move the PEAKER.dll contained within the .zip to your BepInEx/plugins folder.
6. Move the PEAKERPatcher.dll contained within the .zip to your BepInEx/patchers folder.
7. Enjoy! Running the game once will generate the lammas123.PEAKER.cfg file in BepInEx/configs.