0.6.1 — guests stay connected when caught

The Black One no longer calls StopClient for non-host players. A caught guest keeps their existing lobby connection, avatar, items and voice; local movement pauses behind the capture screen until Return to play (or Enter). Guests do not create a server-owned corpse or change server ghost flags. Host corpse/return behavior is unchanged. Install this update on each guest PC. Sync protocol remains 3.

Validation: guest capture, repeat capture, return, actual connection-loss cleanup and existing host capture regressions passed. Build and installed API checks passed. Multiplayer gameplay has not been tested and no game was launched.

0.6.0 — Bentley's debug menu

Press 6 to open or close the scalable eye-banner menu. Click the large buttons or use 1 for White and 2 for Black. The cursor is released while the menu is open and restored on close. Burgundy, cream, white, charcoal and pink follow Bentley's drawing; light text improves contrast on dark buttons.

• Delete current entities clears this mod's figures and landmarks, cancels a pending Black follow-up, and schedules the next natural sighting. Landmarks return at the next natural sighting, manual spawn or reset.
• Disable entity spawning clears the current entities and pauses encounters, including landmarks. The button becomes Enable entity spawning; resuming schedules a new encounter. These controls belong to the encounter leader and are disabled for followers.
• Reset all rebuilds the local presentation and requests fresh peer discovery/snapshots. It keeps saved encounter progress and does not override a spawning pause. It cannot fix a missing mod or version mismatch on another PC.
• Status text reports actual locked/enabled/paused states instead of claiming everything is unlocked.
• All participating PCs need 0.6.0 (sync protocol 3) so pause/delete states agree. Older protocols are isolated.

Validation: build and installed-game API resolution passed; sync flags, invalid packets, progression, presentation, hunt, targeting and host capture regression checks passed. No game was launched; the actual menu appearance, mouse handling and cross-PC behavior still need in-game confirmation.

0.5.1 — retargeting, reconnect isolation, and opaque figures

• White One and Black One now use the installed game's househouse/FlatUnlit shader on every body submesh, including the former eye slots. Colors are solid white/black; native shader metadata confirms opaque geometry queue, LEqual depth testing, and a depth-writing pass. No UI/x-ray material is used for these two figures. The separate item-finder reveal for the giant beyond the wall remains intentional.
• The encounter leader recalculates the nearest eligible modded player every chase frame using 3D chest-to-body distance. Target switches immediately when another player becomes closer. Remote network-controlled rigidbodies can be kinematic without being excluded. Ghosts, dreamers, and unmodded players remain excluded.
• Attack range is 1.25 m after the unchanged 2.5-second initial warning grace. The Black One still moves at 3 m/s and phases/floats; normal geometry now hides its rendering.
• Sync protocol 2 addresses each non-hello packet to the receiver's current random connection nonce. Old snapshots, requests, and capture packets from before a disconnect cannot be replayed on rejoin. A new peer session triggers renewed hello/snapshot delivery. Capture clears the cached replica and returns immediately after disconnect; authority packets are checked in sequence.
• Both PCs MUST update to 0.5.1; 0.5.0 cannot participate in protocol 2.
• Validation: successful compile and runtime API resolution; tests cover nearest-target swaps, attack-range boundary, packet round-trip, old-session replay rejection, sequence ordering, and the existing capture/respawn behavior. Cross-PC reconnect behavior and final rendering still require in-game verification.

0.5.0 — shared Steam lobby encounters

All participating PCs must use 0.5.0. The game host leads encounters when it has this version; otherwise the modded Steam participants elect one leader. Peer discovery and snapshots use a separate Steam P2P channel, scoped to Steam IDs currently present in the Big Walk player roster. Non-modded players do not render the custom entities.

The leader chooses spawns, movement, lifetime, progression, and the Third Bell position. Followers reconstruct the same player-model entities and interpolate the Black One. Debug spawns (6 then 1/2) request a shared spawn. Late joiners receive the current remaining lifetime; expired or removed entities disappear. Leader departure triggers a new election and clears the old encounter. The debug menu shows leader/follower status and the number of other modded peers.

The Black One selects one modded target for the shared chase. Only that target's PC performs its own existing capture/disconnect behavior, after the leader reports contact; the host still uses simulated disconnect and safe corpse return. Unmodded players are not targeted. Item-finder visibility remains specific to each observer using the item.

Validation: compiled against installed assemblies, all referenced Steam/Unity/mod-loader methods resolve, packet round-trip/invalid-input/election checks pass, and the existing hunt/capture/progression/presentation checks pass. Live cross-PC Steam delivery has not been playtested. If the debug menu stays at zero peers while both players run 0.5.0, collect both BepInEx logs; do not assume sharing is working.

0.4.0 — phasing hunt and wall landmarks

• The Black One flies directly toward the local player at 3 m/s, including vertically, through obstacles. The existing warning grace, physical contact check, capture behavior, host corpse return, and chase music remain.
• The One Beyond The Wall is anchored 520 m northward past the authored EndingWall gate, not placed in the camera direction. A loaded scene gate is required; there is no arbitrary camera-relative fallback.
• White One natural and debug placements must be at least 8 m on the near side of that gate plane. Placement fails safely if the gate has not loaded.
• The supplied drawing is interpreted as a 3D giant with a peaked pale hood, dark face, branching horns, broad shoulders, hanging arms, and a red chest bell. Existing progression, sunlight cloak, and item-finder reveal remain.
• The Third Bell is a giant red spherical Christmas/jingle bell with a hanging loop and cut sound slots. Its ordinary pass uses a lit shader with surface normals, ambient lighting, and shadows, not a UI/unlit material.
• Built against the current installed IL2CPP assemblies; capture/progression/presentation tests and runtime API resolution pass. Requires an in-game visual/movement test; no claim of live playtesting.

Beyond The Wall 0.3.2

Built from Brian's confirmed-working v0.1.36 Big Walk ARG mod. Local encounters; this does not synchronize entities or progression to other players. Other people need their own installation to see their own encounters.

Introduction

The White One appears at grounded, unobstructed positions approximately 28–52 metres ahead, for exactly 12 game-time seconds. Very rare elevated sightings are possible. Both figures now use snapshots of real player-model meshes. White is colored white at normal proportions; Black is colored black, stretched to 185% height and 68% width/depth. Only mesh renderers are copied, never player/network scripts, physics, audio or controls. They keep the sampled pose instead of running a player animation controller. If a complete mesh is not ready, the encounter skips/retries instead of showing the old primitive stand-in. White remains harmless. Black now runs at the local player and catches them on body contact. No sudden sound effects or screen jumpscares are added.

First natural encounter is scheduled 45–100 seconds after gameplay detection. Later White encounters have 75–210 seconds between them. After two noticed White sightings, there is a 30% chance of a Black follow-up after each White. Black encounters last 5–8 seconds. Failed placement retries safely instead of leaving an entity floating over missing ground.

Progression

A natural White or Black encounter counts once only after its upper body has remained in the central part of the camera view, with an unobstructed raycast, for 0.75 seconds. Debug spawns do not count. This is a visibility approximation, not eye tracking.

• Six noticed encounters, with at least two White and two Black, unlock the Third Bell.
• The Third Bell is a new enormous, stationary bell silhouette built from procedural geometry, placed 150–240 metres away at a valid ground position. Looking at it for one unobstructed second counts its discovery.
• Twelve noticed White/Black encounters plus discovery of the Third Bell unlock the One Beyond The Wall's cloak reveal.
• The One Beyond The Wall exists at a fixed position before it becomes visible. After unlocking, its huge procedural silhouette appears when its direction aligns within roughly ten degrees of the actual sunlight direction, with the sun above the horizon. It never relocates to follow the camera. Uses RenderSettings.sun, or an active directional light when available. Once unlocked, the vanilla item finder/X-ray effect also reveals it clearly, without sun alignment. The finder reveal uses an unlit depth-independent material when UI/Default is available; deactivating the finder or entering its vanilla dead zone restores the normal cloak/sun rules. The item finder uses PeckEffectPropXRay.activeEffect rather than a keyboard shortcut or merely holding an item.

The late entities use an initial procedural visual design, not imported custom creature assets. No new Bell destruction mechanic is implemented. The two vanilla Bells are neither replaced nor modified, and Bell destruction never gates this progression.

Progress saves beside the plugin as BeyondTheWall.progress.txt, across game sessions and worlds for this local installation. The format is white-count,black-count,bell-seen. To restart progression, close the game and remove that one save file. Malformed saves are ignored. File-write problems are logged without stopping encounters.

Controls

6 / numpad 6 opens or closes debug information. While open, 1 spawns White nearby for 12 seconds and 2 spawns a hostile Black nearby for up to 30 seconds. Test spawns do not unlock later stages. Input is ignored while Big Walk is unfocused. The menu displays natural sighting counts and unlock state.

Build, install, and validation

build.ps1 now uses the local .NET SDK and compiles directly against the installed Big Walk IL2CPP interop/loader assemblies. The old stub references are unused. Install ONLY BeyondTheWall.dll; do not install reference assemblies or duplicate the plugin GUID.

Build and runtime-member verification pass, along with 20 progression/save checks and presentation-rule, contact timing, and host-capture lifecycle checks (mocked engine/network calls). Backups are outside the plugins directory. Existing progression is preserved. No in-game multiplayer playtest has been performed for 0.3.2: use debug 6 then 1/2 to test; a debug Black also catches/disconnects its local guest, or suspends its host; later encounters retain normal progression requirements. Multiplayer encounters remain local, not synchronized.

Only a client running this mod can trigger its own capture. No server kick RPC is sent for other players. Unmodded players can see the native host corpse, but not the local-only Black One. Guest corpse behavior follows vanilla conditions (including corpse-suppression zones). A real two-player test is still needed to confirm corpse visibility, ghost rendering, item return and continuing lobby simulation with the installed mod combination.

0.3.5 chase music

Uses the supplied Run! WAV as local, looping 2D chase music at 65% source volume. Starts after the Black One's 2.5-second warning, when pursuit becomes active. Pauses with menu/focus/immobility chase suspension. Stops immediately on capture, despawn, debug replacement, dream/scene transition, or component shutdown. Keep BlackOneChase.wav beside BeyondTheWall.dll. Missing/bad audio logs a warning without disabling encounters. PCM format verified: stereo, 16-bit, 48 kHz, 30.72 seconds. Build and runtime API checks passed; installed file hashes verified. In-game audio playback remains untested.

Follow-up: 0.3.6 complete body

The visual source is now the game's complete standing corpse/player body template, read without instantiating the corpse. Its 12 pre-shaped meshes include head, nose, torso, bottom, both hands, both feet, and four limbs. Alternate live arm meshes are excluded. Runtime checks require all 11 named major body parts and nonzero scales. Each mesh gets a plain white/black material. Unlike the live player snapshot, this has no first-person hiding, LOD cross-fade state, or GPU spline dependency. No network/physics scripts or colliders are cloned. Black One remains stretched, hostile, and accompanied by Run! chase music. Validation: authored prefab hierarchy and mesh bounds inspected, 12 selected meshes and required solid parts verified; build zero warnings/errors; 186 runtime references resolved. Installed hash verified. Final rendered appearance requires in-game confirmation.

0.3.7: native rendering and visibility audit

Actual v0.3.6 log records successful 12-part spawns; failure is visibility, not failed spawn construction. Complete template geometry is retained. Borrow immutable native shared meshes rather than duplicating GPU assets; never destroy borrowed meshes. Copy each original native material, tint look-color properties, and retain its supported rendering shader. No generic Unlit/Sprites/UI shader is used for entities. Body parts use world layer 0 with enabled rendering. Native shader support, mesh vertex counts, and scales are checked/logged. After half a second a one-time audit logs enabled/visible/in-camera counts and main-camera layer visibility. No extra colliders or network scripts are created. Build: zero warnings/errors; 205 runtime references resolved; source/asset checks passed; installed hashes match. Runtime appearance not yet verified. Run! chase soundtrack unchanged.

0.3.8: Black One chase speed reduced from 5 to 2.5 units/second (50% slower). Build passed; installed SHA256 verified.

0.3.9: host return collision recovery

Before Black One capture, snapshot player hierarchy layers, body-attached colliders (enabled/trigger), rigidbody collisions/gravity/kinematic state, root/body position and rotation. Return now restores ghost flags before collision/placement, synchronizes physics, resumes the prior kinematic mode, clears falling/angular velocity, and restores movement callbacks last. Corpse/item cleanup failure does not skip physical restoration. Positions are restored to the capture location; the moving corpse does not determine the spawn point. Preserves originally disabled/trigger colliders rather than forcing all colliders solid. Original host server remains running. Checks: expanded capture harness simulates ghost-layer/collider changes and a body falling to y=-100, asserts collision, y=10 capture position, zero momentum and original special-collider states after return; previous session-loss, capture failure, corpse failure and remote/guest cases pass. Build zero warnings/errors, 224 API references resolved, installed SHA256 verified. Actual gameplay return still needs confirmation. Slower 2.5 m/s chase and soundtrack retained.

0.3.10: chase speed increased from 2.5 to 3 units/second (20%). Build passed and installed hash verified.

0.3.11: return at the corpse

Normal host return samples the corpse rigidbody's current world center before consuming the corpse. Tests floors and standing room at that position, then concentric offsets up to 3 meters. Rejects triggers, the suspended player/corpse, dynamic supports, steep slopes, blocking solid colliders, voids, and ground without support around the feet. Queries reserve at least 1.8m standing height plus clearance, or the captured collider bounds if larger. A safe result translates both body and root consistently, restores captured collision/ghost states, synchronizes physics, and clears momentum before resuming. If no safe spot exists, retain the corpse and capture screen and display a move-body/retry notice. Teardown/session loss uses forced cleanup at the captured position; no client/server connection changes were added. Checks: moved corpse, nearest safe alternate, blocked/void/unsupported ledge rejection, collision restoration and previous capture regressions pass; build zero warnings/errors; 236 runtime API references resolve; installed DLL hash verified. In-game physics remains to be confirmed. Chase remains 3m/s.