Better Buddy

Buddy is great when you play alone. Bring friends and he quietly stops helping.

That is not an impression, it is how he is built. Most of his jobs are switched off above one or two crew, he abandons hull repairs the moment the ship crosses half health, and at the combat station he is scripted to miss roughly half his shots.

Better Buddy removes those limits and puts an in-game menu on Buddy himself, so you can turn each change on or off mid-mission. Nothing is forced on you, and stock behaviour is always one toggle away.

Features

Help At Any Crew Size

Every job carries a hidden crew limit. Reviving, scanning, clearing the materia filter and following you on foot are solo only. Hull repair, core repair, ammo resupply and manning a gun stop at two players. This lifts all of them, and sets the cap high enough that it still works alongside mods that raise the lobby size.

Repair Until Hull Full

Stock Buddy starts repairing below 50% hull, then drops the job the instant it climbs back over 50%, because the same value is used for both. Now he still waits for real damage, but once he starts he keeps going until the hull is whole or he runs out of kits. He also reconsiders his job every second instead of every five.

Space Combat Aim(Ro)bot

Buddy alternates 1.5 seconds on target and 1.5 seconds deliberately off it. That is a coin flip on every shot, and it is brutal on slow weapons where a miss costs a full reload. With this on, he simply aims.

Smarter Job Order

Core repairs and ammo resupply rank exactly as high as standing in the canteen doing nothing. Clearing the materia filter ranks below it, which is why he sometimes announces he is clearing the filters and never does. The order becomes:

Revive crewmate > Repair hull > Man a gun > Core repair
  > Resupply ammo > Scan > Clear materia filter > Follow > Idle

An in-game menu

Look at Buddy and hold the third prompt, Buddy Enhancements. Hover an option and release to toggle. Green tick is on, red cross is off. It uses the game's own radial menu, so it behaves like the task wheel you already know. Settings persist.

Only the host needs this

Buddy is run by whoever hosts the session, so their copy is the one that counts. Crew can install it too and the menu will open, but their switches change nothing and the labels say so.

No game files are modified.

Manual install

If you are not using a mod manager: install MelonLoader 0.7.3 or newer, then place BetterBuddy.dll in Jump Space\Mods\. Settings live in Jump Space\UserData\MelonPreferences.cfg under [BetterBuddy].

Known interaction

Anyone in your crew can still block Buddy's jobs through his normal task wheel, and that overrides everything here. If he stops working with all switches on, check the task wheel first. Those blocks persist between sessions.

Credits

Keepsake Games for the game. LavaGang for MelonLoader. And the Jump Space community on the Steam forums, whose reports of Buddy announcing he is clearing the filters and never doing it pointed at what turned out to be a real priority bug.