Dio_Company - Time Stop

Adds a host-permissioned "time stop" ability to Lethal Company. The host — or anyone the host grants permission to — can freeze time: the clock stops, every other player and all enemies and hazards freeze in place, but the caster can still move, loot, and fight freely. Damage the caster deals while paused (to enemies or other players) is queued up and lands all at once the moment time resumes.

How to use it

• Press J to start (or end early) a time stop. Default keybind, rebindable in the config file.
• Only the host, or a player the host has explicitly allowed, can trigger it.
• The player who cast it is the only one who can end it early — otherwise it runs out on its own.
• After your own time-stop ends, you personally have a cooldown before you can start another — this doesn't affect anyone else's ability to use theirs.

Granting permission

The host grants or revokes permission live, in-game, via chat:

/allow PlayerName
/deny PlayerName

No menu needed — just type it in the normal chat box. Only the host's commands are honored.

What freezes

• The day/night clock
• All enemies, including their animations (Animator and VFX Graph/particle-driven swarms like locusts alike) and contact-based attacks/attach mechanics (e.g. tulip snakes)
• Turrets
• Spike roof traps (including the crush trigger, even mid-slam)
• Landmines (the explosion is queued, not skipped — stepping off an armed mine while paused defers the blast until time resumes instead of dropping it)
• The mineshaft elevator
• All frozen enemies/hazards are silenced for the duration too
• Damage the caster deals to other players is queued the same way as enemy damage

Effect

A greyscale/desaturation and chromatic-aberration pulse plays on pause and reverses on resume, along with a sound cue and a scan-pulse flash (color customizable per-player, see Config).

Config

Found in BepInEx/config/com.paul.diocompany.timestop.cfg after first launch:

Requirements

Everyone in the lobby needs this mod installed for it to work correctly.

Changelog

1.2.1

A big freeze-coverage pass after a lot of testing turned up plenty of stuff that was slipping through.

• Frozen players are actually frozen now, no more jumping, using an item, or drowning while time's stopped. Momentum is conserved despite the freeze
• Dropped/thrown items keep their momentum instead of just falling
• Sound now pauses for everyone except whoever cast it
• The ship, the delivery shuttle, and the company monster all stay put while paused instead of carrying on
• You can no longer die to a kill that was already in progress when the pause hit (Forest Giant, company monster grabs) — it waits until you resume
• The entry fan, turret bullets, the old bird's rockets, and a bunch of other particle effects all freeze properly now
• Enemies no longer keep swiveling to track you while otherwise frozen
• The Hygrodere's wobble is frozen
• Cleared out a leftover config setting from an old build that had no business still being there
• Fixed a bug where a few of the above (item physics, audio, flame effects) could get stuck permanently paused after just one freeze/resume cycle
• Known issue: the ship/shuttle/old bird flame effects disappear during a pause instead of freezing in place — turns out they're driven by a shader with no real way to pause it, so this is the best we've got for now

1.1.0

• Enemy freeze now also pauses VFX Graph/particle-driven animations (e.g. locust swarms), not just Animator-driven ones
• Damage the caster deals to other players while paused is now queued and applied on resume, same as enemy damage
• Cooldown is now per-player instead of shared globally
• Scan-pulse flash color is now configurable per-player (ScanPulseColorHex), as a local display preference
• Added diagnostic logging for an in-progress investigation into a reported caster-identification bug with 3+ players

1.0.0

Initial release.

• Host-permissioned time stop with a J keybind, chat-command permission granting (/allow, /deny), and a 5-second cooldown
• Freezes enemies (including contact-triggered attacks), turrets, spike traps, landmines (deferring rather than skipping the explosion), and the mineshaft elevator
• Damage the caster deals while paused is queued and applied on resume
• Greyscale/chromatic-aberration visual effect with a sound cue and a pink scan-pulse flash