DRONE MOD

Personal sentry and FPV companion
Version 0.1.17 for How to Fish / BepInEx 5

DRONE MOD gives you a personal flying companion for exploration and island defense. Your drone can follow at your shoulder, hold position as an airborne sentry, or switch to a first-person camera that you pilot yourself. Equip it with a gun, improve its combat systems, give it a custom name, and recolor the body, propellers, and accents so it feels like your own machine.

Press F3 to open the violet-and-green Drone Control Center from anywhere. A drone costs $10,000, and each player may own one.

Controls and first flight

1. Press F3 and purchase your drone for $10,000. Each player may own one.
2. Hold the drone and hold E to launch it, or choose Follow mode in F3.
3. Buy a weapon in the Main tab. Buying a different weapon replaces the equipped gun; buying the same equipped gun does not charge you twice.
4. Set its follow leash radius, customize its colors, and select Follow, Turret, or FPV mode.

Drone Control Center

The F3 interface shows the drone’s name, owner, operating mode, current distance from its owner, weapon, ammunition, targeting tier, upgrade level, and safety status. Its Main tab controls the weapon, flight mode, follow leash radius, upgrades, targeting, Recall to Leash, and Recall to Hands. The two recall controls use compact labels so both actions remain fully readable at the normal interface scale. The Colors tab has separate RGB controls for:

• Main body
• Propellers
• Accents and lights

The selected colors update immediately for the owner, host, and other players. They are saved with the drone and appear on its world model, held model, and hotbar icon.

You can rename the drone in the Main tab. Look toward a deployed drone from up to eight metres away to see its name, owner, and current mode directly above the interaction prompt. This cooler-style proximity and look-angle check does not depend on hitting the drone's small pickup collider. The same extended range lets its owner hold E to pick it up.

Follow and flight modes

Follow mode calculates its launch point from the activating player's live movement transform and camera direction. It initially places the drone front-right, about 3 meters away, and approximately 3 meters above that player. The F3 slider controls a player-centered leash radius from 1 to 5 meters. The drone remains at its current horizontal position while it is inside that radius. After the player moves outside the radius, the drone drifts toward the player-centered area until it reaches the halfway point of the leash, then settles there until the radius is crossed again. Vertical following continues so it stays above the player. Flying drones ignore world-item collision while leashed, preventing invisible walls, terrain, and scenery from trapping them. Flight positioning bypasses the stationary player network root and stale item or boat-local coordinates, so launching on another island cannot pull the drone back to an old location.

Switching an airborne drone from Turret or FPV mode to Follow keeps its current world position and makes it fly smoothly toward the player-centered leash area. Long-distance mode transitions are treated as intentional travel and do not trigger the normal separation recovery teleport. Recall to Leash remains the explicit immediate reposition option. After a Follow-mode drone finishes moving back into its leash area, it eases into the same gentle vertical stabilization hover used in Turret mode. The hover fades away as soon as the drone starts following again, keeping travel smooth and directional.

While carried, the drone rests between the player’s default hands like a normal two-handed item. Holding E launches it above and forward with a quick eased righting animation before it settles into the saved follow point. Its startup sound plays once at the same reduced volume level as the hum, then blends into the low-volume positional loop. Each flying drone has its own proximity audio, so it becomes quieter as you move away. During FPV, the owner’s hum is lowered and muffled further for comfort.

Turret mode locks the drone at its current airborne position while keeping automated targeting active. A gentle vertical hover motion makes it look like the flight controller is continuously stabilizing it. Recall to Leash works from any distance and restores the last Follow position. Recall to Hands retrieves the drone as a carried item when your hands are empty.

FPV mode gives the player direct flight and weapon control. The camera and local drone model update from frame-by-frame controls while synchronized movement is smoothly interpolated for other players, removing the stepping caused by network snapshots. Acceleration, stopping, and visible turning are eased. The camera and HUD switch through the game's active-camera system after the host confirms that the drone entered FPV mode; failed connections return cleanly to player control. Your character remains visible from the drone camera. Normal FPV movement stays level; Freecam allows movement and rotation on any plane. Automated targeting is disabled until FPV ends. A security-camera display adds subtle white corner framing, a blinking red REC marker, and a center-dot crosshair. Hold right mouse for a gradual precision zoom. The bottom controls show live progress while E is held for two seconds. Completing the hold fixes the drone at its exact current position, activates Turret mode and automatic targeting, and returns the camera and controls to the player. The drone can later resume Follow mode or re-enter FPV from F3. The normal hotbar and other game HUD elements are hidden while health and hunger remain visible.

Launching the drone only plays its normal startup sound and begins the positional hum. Once it is active, changing to Follow, Turret, or FPV sends a dedicated reliable mode event and plays the supplied announcement for that mode at the same quiet positional volume as the target-acquired beeps. The event waits briefly for audio loading and is deduplicated on each client so it cannot be skipped by a visual snapshot or played twice. Players hear these announcements according to their distance from the drone. During FPV, the owner continues to hear the filtered drone hum at 30% of its normal volume.

Weapons and combat

Weapons are purchased through the F3 Main tab and mount beneath the drone. The weapon’s range follows its class:

The drone has unlimited reserve ammunition but uses the equipped weapon’s magazine, firing cadence, reload timing, projectiles, effects, and sounds. Deployment starts with a full magazine. Ten upgrade levels compound damage, range, reload speed, and firing rate while narrowing the accuracy cone. Drone hits display normal damage numbers and kills are credited to the owner using the creature's complete multiplier-adjusted value. When the drone finds a new target, it plays a quiet three-beep cue and waits one second before opening fire.

The compact world model uses a rounded low-poly body with four protected circular rotor guards, bright blades, cyan status lights, and a weapon assembly mounted beneath the center. It is roughly 60% of the original prototype's size. During idle scanning, the underside gun-and-hands assembly rotates like the turret mount at 30 degrees above horizontal, with the assembly rolled upside down for the drone's bottom mounting position.

Tier 1 targets living seagulls by default. Tier 2 adds loose fish for $20,000, and Tier 3 adds bosses for $100,000. Fish attached to a line, held by a player, or stored in inventory are ignored. Dead creatures and unrelated NPCs are never targeted.

Friendly-fire protection is enabled by default. Enabling friendly fire requires an extra confirmation.

Ownership, carrying, and selling

Only the owner can control, collect, or use a drone. Other players cannot operate it or claim it. The owner can recall the drone from the F3 menu whether it is flying, deployed, stored, carried, or dropped. Recall to Hands requires empty hands and preserves the drone’s weapon, name, upgrades, targeting tier, colors, and other settings.

The drone behaves as a physical inventory item when carried. It can be held with both hands, placed in a hotbar slot, dropped, and picked up. Selling it to a money vendor removes the drone record and pays its resale value, including its installed upgrades, targeting tiers, and equipped gun value.

Multiplayer and saves

The host stores drone data in BepInEx/config/DroneMod-worlds.json; the normal game save stores the physical item. Keep both saves together. Every co-op player should install the same DRONE MOD version so names, colors, flight state, weapons, targeting, and FPV movement synchronize correctly.

Installation

Install the Thunderstore package for How to Fish, enable DRONE MOD, and launch the game through the mod manager. Restart the game after updating the mod.