SpongeMods - SpongeSpeedRunners

A cheat and exploration mod for How to Fish. Built to sit alongside SpongeTweaks without conflicting, while interoperating with it when both are present. Neither mod requires the other.

Built and verified against the current game build, BepInEx 5.4.2305.

Features

Everything is switchable in BepInEx/config/spongemods.howtofish.deepseaoverride.cfg.

Keybinds

The dev island is also reachable simply by sailing past the last normal island.

God mode is player-only, by construction

The request was explicit that invincibility must not extend to bosses or fish. That is guaranteed structurally rather than by a filter that could be wrong:

• Player health lives in PlayerVitals._syncedHealth, changed only by PlayerVitals.TakeDamage.
• Fish and bosses are Creature, which derives from Item and carries its own _hp SyncVar changed through Creature.ServerChangeHp.

The two share no damage code, so the single patch on PlayerVitals.TakeDamage cannot reach a creature. Fish and bosses keep taking damage from you and dealing damage to each other exactly as in vanilla; they simply can no longer kill a player.

TakeDamage was confirmed to be the only sink for player damage. Weapons and punches (through Server.HitPlayer), drowning, hunger, poison, fire, crab attacks and boss damage all funnel into it, and it is the only place that lowers _syncedHealth or calls ServerDie. Blocking it blocks death itself, not merely most sources of it.

Multiplayer model

The stated assumption is that every player has both mods.

Nothing here invents a networking layer where the game already has one. The island in particular needed no custom sync at all: SpawnIsland writes a SyncVar, and a client joining later reads its current value on connect.

Baby Bitch Boy

The game's Difficulty enum has exactly three values and is baked into the save format, so a real fourth value would corrupt saves and every switch that reads it. Instead this is a virtual fourth option:

• Selecting it stores Difficulty.Hard everywhere the game looks, so health and damage multipliers are the hardest available and a run stays legitimate for speedrunning.
• A separate per-world flag remembers the choice so the menus can display BABY BITCH BOY.
• The "easy" half comes from this mod's other features, not from softened difficulty numbers. That is the point of the mode.

Both difficulty cyclers are handled (ChangeDifficultyButton on the create screen, ChangeCurServerDifficulty on the server settings screen). Rather than transpiling the enum bound, the patch intercepts the wrap: stepping past Hard holds on Hard and raises the flag, and stepping again continues to Easy. The resulting cycle was simulated and verified to give four distinct positions in both directions, with Baby always internally Hard.

The dev island

The shipped build contains seven scenes:

0  Game.unity          (main scene)
1  Island1   -> island index 0
...
5  Island5   -> island index 4
6  DevIsland -> island index 5   <- normally unreachable

IslandManager loads island N with LoadSceneAsync(N + 1), and OnlineIslandManager.NextIslandInBuild wraps once the index reaches TotalIslands - 1, which is exactly 5. That single off-by-one is what hides the island. The patch extends the wrap by one so the dev island becomes the last stop in the normal rotation, still routed through SpawnIsland so it stays server-authoritative.

The pink dot

The request was conditional: pink only if that colour is not already used. Dot colours live in the scene, not in code, so they are sampled at runtime and compared in HSV space (hue distance within 0.06 turns, ignoring greys and near blacks, since two pinks can differ in brightness and still read as the same colour on a small radar).

If any island already uses a similar colour, the feature stands down and logs which dot clashed rather than adding a second indistinguishable marker.

The dot itself is cloned from an existing radar dot, so it inherits the radar's sprite, size and parent, and is driven through the game's own private UpdateDot so it pings and fades identically to the built-in ones.

Conflict analysis with SpongeTweaks

Zero shared patch targets. Verified mechanically:

SpongeTweaks : 49 targets
SpongeSpeedRunners   : 11 targets
Overlap             : 0

Both mods patch the PlayerMovement class, but never the same method:

Two interactions were checked rather than assumed:

1. Multi-jump vs the Compendium's Jump prefix. That prefix returns early for anything not swimming, so mid-air jumps pass straight through it.
2. Fast swimming vs the Compendium's water speed clamp. Its FixedUpdate postfix caps horizontal speed in water, which would otherwise pin 5x swimming back to roughly walking pace. Two defences:
   • SwimmingInterop reads that mod's config reflectively and widens its Water Speed Clamp Headroom so the clamp permits the requested speed. If the required headroom exceeds the entry's maximum of 5, the clamp is turned off instead and this mod owns water speed.
   • The boost is applied in LateUpdate, which runs after the whole physics step and is unclaimed by the other mod, so it lands last regardless.

All of that is resolved by name through reflection and treated as absent when missing, so this mod behaves correctly standalone. Neither mod depends on the other.

Naming

Everything internal carries the SpongeMods identifier:

The cross-mod interop resolves SpongeTweaks by namespace string, so that string had to be renamed in lockstep. tools/VerifyModInterop exists specifically to catch a mismatch there, since it compiles fine and simply disables interop silently at runtime.

Bugs found and fixed during optimisation

These were caught by inspection after the features worked, and are the kind that only appear in a long session:

Building and verifying

dotnet build -c Release

Both mods are verified together by one script in the parent directory:

../verify-all.sh

Current results for this mod: 22 game references resolve, 14 patch signatures valid, plus the shared interop and conflict checks.

Those tools compare declarations only. They cannot see plain C# behaviour, so requirement-to-code tracing and the difficulty cycle simulation were done separately. See the SpongeTweaks README section "What the verifiers cannot see" for why that distinction matters; ignoring it previously hid a dropped feature in that mod.

Status

Built, statically verified and installed to BepInEx/plugins/SpongeMods-SpongeSpeedRunners/.

Not yet run in-game. How to Fish is a Windows title run through Proton and BepInEx has never started in this profile, so no runtime evidence could be collected. On first launch check BepInEx/LogOutput.log for:

SpongeSpeedRunners 1.0.0 loaded. GodMode=True Fists=True ... MultiJump=10 SwimSpeed=5x

Then verify in play, in rough order of risk:

1. The difficulty cycler shows BABY BITCH BOY after Hard, in both directions.
2. Sailing past the last island reaches the dev island, and a second player joining mid-session lands there too.
3. The radar shows a pink dot, or the log explains which colour it clashed with.
4. Fish and bosses still take and deal damage normally while players cannot die.