ScorchedVoxels

Space-Engineers-style destructible terrain for Risk of Rain 2. Every explosion carves the world for real: at stage load the static terrain converts into voxel density fields, and from then on craters and tunnels are real geometry, permanent until the stage ends. Blasts throw up a rim of displaced rock, and blades cut: a melee swing slices out the rock it sweeps through, and thrown blades like Chef's cleaver carve along their flight. Dig wide, dig deep. Deep rock materializes as you reach it. Works in multiplayer: the whole lobby sees the same holes.

Current release: 0.20.72 "Blood Money".

What it costs

Real geometry is not free. Know the price before you install:

• RAM, a fair amount of it. Expect the game to use 5 to 8 GB with converted terrain loaded, depending on the map. It was worse; 0.20.69 cut it roughly in half.
• A second loading screen, every stage. The voxels are built when a level loads, and on big maps that takes a while. This is the mod's real downside, and it's why the loading screen grew player cards and then a whole arcade: something worth looking at, and now something to play, while the terrain builds.

Destruction

• Craters are carved from the terrain itself, not drawn on top. The cost per blast is constant: the 100th rocket deforms as cheaply as the first.
• Blades cut the ground. A melee swing carves out the slice its arc sweeps through rock, for every survivor and monster with a sword, club or claw. Thrown blades count too: Chef's cleaver slices along its whole flight.
• Materials have hardness. Metal and concrete resist, crystal and ice shatter into slightly smaller craters, dirt and snow blow out wide. The hardness table is built in, tuned against every stage's material list (base game plus DLC), and identical on every machine.
• Debris is the rock you broke. What flies out of a crater matches the volume removed, textured with the ground it broke from. Sword cuts drop a slab shaped like the cut, and big chunks shatter into smaller pieces when they land. All of it is visual-only and close to free.
• Colliders never cheat. Distant terrain renders at reduced detail to save frames, but what you stand on and shoot is always exact.

Gore (experimental, off by default)

Kills are comic gore, in the same spirit as the terrain: the bodies really come apart.

Gore is experimental and ships disabled. Flip the Gore switch in the options menu (or GoreEnabled in the config) to opt in. It is stable in normal play; performance in very large fights is still being tuned.

• Every death goes physical. Canned death animations are gone. Bodies ragdoll, and the killing blow shapes the corpse: blades cut it in half along the actual swing, explosions rip it into flying wedges, bullets drop it where it stands. Corpses linger about two minutes and stay cuttable the whole time, and severed pieces can be cut again in the air.
• Blood sticks to the world. Kill splatter, dribbling pieces, drifting droplets and sword-swing sprays all land as decals on the terrain and soak into carved rock. Hits on live enemies leave bleeding wounds, and every survivor's primary marks its target: Huntress arrows stay planted where they land.
• Big hits tear chunks out of living enemies. A heavy enough blow rips a piece off a body that keeps fighting: the hole bleeds, moves with the animation, and stays through death. Rare on ordinary hits, roughly one in ten on heavy ones. Cosmetic only; hitboxes never change, and players are exempt.
• Elements sign their kills. Fire chars the body, ice shatters it, acid eats it down to a husk, lightning arcs across it, void collapses it with rising sparks. Massive overkill stages a bigger show.
• Purely cosmetic. Corpse shapes are local to each machine and never affect gameplay. Everything rides hard caps, so a messy fight cannot run away with your frame rate. The Gore switch and the Blood Amount slider live in the options menu; in multiplayer the host's blood amount applies to everyone.

The loading screen

While a stage converts, the mod replaces the wait with a player-card wall:

• An arcade. A PLAY button opens four minigames while you wait: an endless runner, a Worms-style artillery duel on destructible pixel terrain, a multi-level circuit race with a grappling hook, and a terrarium where a small stone pet eats what you carved during the level and grows across runs. Open tanks show live under their owner's card for the whole lobby. Solo or lobby-wide, and the stage never waits for the game (unless the host locks loading on purpose).
• One card per player: portrait, live loading progress, and run stats (kills, damage, gold, and carved ground in m³).
• Crowns for the stage's top three, ranked by kills, then damage, then rock carved.
• Your portrait rim tracks lifetime digging through five tiers: wood, bronze (1M m³), silver (10M), gold (100M), and platinum (1B), saved per user profile.
• Rotating tips explain how the mod works while you wait.

Titles, calling cards, and the unlock reel

• Every cleared stage rolls a chance at a cosmetic title and, separately, a card background pattern. The terrarium pet digs up name effects as it grows: animated treatments for the name on your card, from calm coats and dripping letters to names whose letters are made of fire.
• Winning queues the prize; the reel unlocks it. On the next loading screen a slot-machine reel spins under your card for each queued prize, one after another, and the moment a reel lands the prize is truly yours. Win three things in one stage and three reels play back to back while everyone watches.
• A prize can never be lost. If the stage starts mid-spin, or the reel never got its turn, the prize stays queued and spins on the next loading screen. The queue survives quitting the game.
• Over thirty of the card backgrounds are animated, from a radar sweep, digital rain and a heart monitor to a lava lamp, a black hole, a campfire and a self-playing game of Snake. Two more (Living Void and Living Flame) play a live shader from the game itself on the card face.
• Your first cleared stage on a fresh profile always queues something.
• All 199 country flags and every pride flag are free from the start. Only the patterns come from the lottery.
• Pick what your card wears under Settings > Mod Options > ScorchedVoxels, with the Choose Title, Choose Card Background and Choose Name Effect buttons.
• Cosmetics show only on the loading screen. Nothing follows you into the run.

Multiplayer

• Everyone needs the mod, on the same version. A mismatched player stays on vanilla terrain with a chat warning instead of desyncing.
• Host-authoritative: the host's terrain settings apply to the whole lobby, and everyone sees the same craters.
• The host waits for the slowest loader as long as their game keeps reporting progress. Leavers and players without the mod never hold the lobby hostage.
• Risk of Options installs automatically as a dependency. It provides the settings menu and the cosmetic pickers.

Installation

Install with a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager, or Gale) and the dependencies come along automatically.

Manual install: drop ScorchedVoxels.dll into BepInEx/plugins and install the dependencies listed on this page.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.Xerdi.ScorchedVoxels.cfg, or Settings > Mod Options in-game. Highlights:

Setting	What it does
VoxelSize (0.5 m)	Crater fidelity vs. memory and conversion time. Maps too large auto-coarsen.
RadiusMultiplier / MaxCarveRadius	How big blasts carve.
LodDistance (90 m)	Distant terrain renders at reduced detail. Colliders never LOD.
ExcludedNames	Name fragments that keep specific meshes vanilla.
Effects section	Rock debris, the gore switch, the blood amount slider.
Titles section	Lottery toggle, reveal sounds.

In multiplayer, all geometry-affecting settings are the host's.

Lifetime stats and cosmetic unlocks persist in BepInEx/config/com.Xerdi.ScorchedVoxels.UserStats.cfg per user profile.

Known limits

• Four maps ship their terrain meshes without CPU-readable data (Siphoned Forest, Sulfur Pools, Sundered Grove, Void Locus). A built-in whitelist reads those meshes from the game's own asset files instead, so every current map converts. If a future game update ships new unreadable meshes, they stay vanilla with a log line until they get whitelisted.
• Converted terrain loses baked lightmaps in carved areas. Ground pathfinding follows craters a few meters down and routes around deeper pits, but monsters may still path oddly around extreme tunnels.
• Half-open decorative meshes voxelize as thin hollow shells (they have no defined "inside").
• A few spots grow phantom rock where a mesh converted imperfectly (bleedout). Sorry about that. Screenshot anything you find and report it; these get hunted down one by one.

Credits

Made by Nyn.

Rock and Stone!