🧛 BetterCards — Vampire Crawlers mod

A BepInEx mod for Vampire Crawlers that enhances the card UI with useful information at a glance.

Features

✨ Level-up card selection — badges

• 🥇 EVO (animated chromatic medallion, top-right) — appears on a card when picking it would complete an evolution combo your deck doesn't yet have. The rainbow ring rotates and a light streak sweeps across it for a holographic foil effect.
• 🥈 EVO bis (smaller silver medallion with a green ✓, top-right) — appears when the offered card would complete a combo, but the combo is already covered by your current deck. Picking is redundant for that combo (still useful info if you want a duplicate, evolved tier, etc.).
• 🌈 NEW (rainbow pill, top-left) — appears when you own zero copies of that card
• 🔢 ×N (gold pill, top-left) — shows how many copies of that card you already own

No more guessing whether a card completes a combo or whether you've seen it before.

📊 Deck viewer — COMPOSITION panel

When you open the draw pile or discard pile modal during combat, a COMPOSITION panel appears showing the mana cost distribution of your full deck (draw pile + hand + discard pile combined).

Each mana cost is shown as a colored orb with a count badge. The panel adapts to your deck size:

• Small deck (≤10 cards visible) — panel appears horizontally below the card list
• Large deck (11+ cards) — panel moves to the right side of the modal as a vertical list

Companion cards are excluded from the count. The panel refreshes automatically when you evolve cards at altars or pick up wild cards.

🔒 Card Lock

Right-click any card (in combat hand, draw pile, or discard pile) to lock it. A golden padlock replaces the mana cost orb, and the game treats the card as unaffordable: clicking, dragging, pressing space/enter, or any other play attempt produces the natural "can't afford" shake + sound feedback instead of playing the card.

• 🎯 Why it exists — for cards with Destruction (one-shot consumed on play): you typically want to keep them in hand until you're ready (combo, fusion altar, etc.). Locking prevents accidental plays while you cycle through your other cards.
• 🖱️ How to lock — right-click the card, or press . / Suppr on the numeric keypad while hovering it.
• ⏭️ Auto-skip — when every card in hand is locked or unaffordable, the turn auto-ends if you have the game's "End turn automatically" option enabled.
• 💾 Persistence — locks survive game restarts (stored per-card via stable GUID in BepInEx/config/BetterCards.locks.txt).
• 📚 Modal — the same padlock appears on locked cards in the draw pile / discard pile modal. Right-click in the modal toggles the lock for that specific card. Two copies of the same card are tracked independently.

The whole feature can be disabled in BepInEx/config/com.tovak.vc.bettercards.cfg if you ever want to.

🌍 Multilingual support

The COMPOSITION panel is translated into all 12 languages the game ships with: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Switch language mid-session and the panel rebuilds instantly.

Screenshots

EVO and NEW badges

EVO bis badge (combo already covered by deck)

×N badge (owned card count)

COMPOSITION panel — horizontal (small deck)

COMPOSITION panel — vertical (large deck)

Card Lock — locked card in combat hand

Requirements

• BepInEx 6.0.0-be.755 (IL2CPP) or later

Vampire Crawlers is an IL2CPP game. Make sure you use the CoreCLR / IL2CPP build of BepInEx 6, not the Mono one, otherwise the mod will not load.

Installation

Steam:

1. Install BepInEx 6 (IL2CPP) in your Vampire Crawlers folder
2. Drop BetterCards.dll into Vampire Crawlers/BepInEx/plugins/
3. Launch the game

Game Pass: same steps, but BepInEx goes into Vampire Crawlers/Content/ (where the .exe is).

Author

TovaK

If you enjoy the mod, you can support me on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/tovak66

Source code: github.com/TovaK66/BetterCards

License

Free to use and redistribute. Credit appreciated.