Paranoid Company

Stay in the dark and the building starts making sounds it shouldn't.

Not jumpscares. Someone whispering two rooms away, too quiet to make out. A breath behind you. Someone humming. Footsteps that cross the corridor and stop. Every one of them muffled, distant, and just deniable enough that you'll keep telling yourself you imagined it — until you don't.

Turn your light on and it slows down. Stand somewhere properly lit and it stops.

Everything this mod plays is local to you. Nothing is sent over the network, so nobody else hears it and monsters can't either. Your friends will only know something is wrong from the way you start acting.

What you hear

107 bundled sounds, plus a lot of the game's own audio borrowed at runtime.

Whispering is the point

Close human sounds have their own folder and their own rules. They play 1.5 to 6 metres from you — never across a room, never through a wall, never filtered down to nothing. A whisper thirty metres away isn't unsettling, it's inaudible, which is exactly why you have to be able to place it as a person, at your shoulder, right now.

They can happen at any stage, and by default they're the most common thing you hear. 46 clips: whispering short, long and urgent, breathing, humming, swallowing — a different speaker every time.

The human ones are synthesised as actual speech — real vowel formants gliding into each other, consonants, breath before a phrase, mouth clicks between words, the occasional swallow — so it sounds like a person saying something you can't quite catch, not like a sound effect. Every clip gets a different speaker: a different voice pitch, a different head size, a different pace.

46 of those are close human sounds in Sounds/Whispers; the other 61 are spread across Stage1, Stage2 and Stage3 by how close and how urgent they are.

And from your own game, at runtime — all real recordings, and deliberately only the ones you can't put a name to:

• the real coilhead spring — the loud coil, dead behind you
• the ghost girl's breathing, her skipping, her staring sting
• the game's own insanity ambience — the audio written for her sanity drain — played as a few seconds lifted out of the middle and faded
• the hull creaking, something dragging
• doors creaking open and slamming — but only ever from a door that is really standing near you
• the level's own ambient one-shots
• real footsteps, matched to the floor surface you're standing on

Nothing is extracted or redistributed. The mod reads the clips your game already has in memory, so they always match your version and always sound like Lethal Company.

Deliberately left out: the ship's announcer and the Company voice, the game's scored music, death screams, gore, the maneater's crying, laughter, radio chatter, and monster voices. Every one of those is instantly identifiable — and a player who can name the sound has stopped being unsettled by it and started thinking the mod is buggy. Monster voices can be switched back on with ExtraEnemyVoices if you want them, vanilla enemies only.

Footsteps are their own thing now

Phantom footsteps don't play from a fixed spot. A line of steps starts behind you, crosses the room or comes straight at you, and stops. At Stage 3 they run.

They run on a completely separate schedule from every other sound, with their own folder and their own distances, so they never have to compete with a whisper to be heard.

They are the rarest thing in the mod, and deliberately irregular: when the timer comes round there's only a 72% chance it actually happens (FootstepChance). Two skips in a row is a long, pointed silence, and it means you can never learn when to expect them. Roughly one footstep event for every four other sounds.

Half the time they start out of sight — through a wall, around a corner — and walk into the open. Those begin heavily muffled and the filter opens up as they come, which is the difference between "a sound played" and "somebody is coming". The number of steps follows the distance walked, at a real stride, so the phantom moves at a human speed rather than crossing ten metres in four steps.

One at a time

Two hallucinations overlapping reads as a bug rather than as company, so the mod never starts a sound while another is still audible. OneSoundAtATime in the config if you want the old behaviour.

No two are the same

Every play is randomised: pitch, loudness, how muffled it is, which direction, how far, and whether it starts partway into the clip so you only catch the end of a sentence. One in five is deliberately placed in the next room, so it arrives through a wall with the top end gone.

You will not learn these sounds.

How it escalates

One clock: how long you have been in the dark. It only runs while you're actually in an unlit spot inside the facility.

Close whispering sits outside that ladder — it can happen from the very first event, and it's always at conversational range.

At Stage 3 about one sound in five is one of the game's unmistakable ones, drawn from a reserved pool so they're guaranteed to turn up rather than being one clip among dozens. The first Stage 3 sound is always one of them, so reaching Stage 3 announces itself.

The coilhead is the one sound in this mod that is supposed to be recognised. Everything else is muffled, distant and deniable on purpose; the coil is not. It is the game's own loud spring noise, dead behind you at arm's length, played dry and at full volume with no filtering at all — the sound one makes when it stops because you turned around. The first Stage 3 moment of a run is always the coil.

After that it arrives in one of three forms, and never the same one twice running: the loud coil at your shoulder, a rapid burst of snaps closing in, or — the one that actually gets people — a coilhead running at you from up to eleven metres back, muffled at first and opening up as it comes, ending on the coil as it stops dead.

Doors, but only real ones

Door creaks and slams are played from the world position of a door that is actually there, preferring one you aren't looking at, and sometimes the same door shuts again a second later. If nothing near you is a door, no door sound happens at all — a door creaking in a corridor with no door in it is the moment somebody stops believing any of it.

And the first Stage 3 footstep event always runs, so you can't finish a round having never heard something sprint at you.

A Lethal Company day is only about eleven real minutes, so the defaults are sized so a single round can actually reach the end of it. In normal play — some lit rooms, torch on most of the time — expect roughly 24 sounds across a day — about four fifths ambience and voices, one fifth footsteps — one every thirty-odd seconds while you're in the dark, and to reach Stage 3 near the end. Stand in the dark deliberately and it's about one every thirteen seconds.

Getting out of it

• Your own torch halves the clock. Carrying a light buys you time, it doesn't make you safe.
• A lit room stops the clock outright.
• 45 seconds in the light resets everything to zero — back to Stage 1 and a fresh 20 seconds of darkness before you hear anything.

Ducking through a lit corridor won't save you. Your progress is still sitting there waiting. If Stage 3 has started and you want it to stop, you have to actually commit to standing somewhere lit and wait it out.

Install

Thunderstore Mod Manager / r2modman — install it like any other mod. BepInEx is pulled in automatically.

Manual — drop the BepInEx folder from this package into your Lethal Company folder so the plugin ends up at:

Lethal Company/BepInEx/plugins/ParanoidCompany/ParanoidCompany.dll

Everyone in the lobby can install it, or just you. It does not need to match.

Adding your own sounds

Drop files in a folder, restart, done. No Unity Editor, no asset bundles.

BepInEx/plugins/ParanoidCompany/Sounds/
├── Whispers/  close human sounds — plays 1.5-6 m away, any stage
├── Footsteps/ single steps, strung into moving sequences
├── Stage1/    further off
├── Stage2/    closer
├── Stage3/    aggressive
└── Voices/    recordings of your friends

Footsteps/ takes one step per file — the mod builds the sequence itself. Leave it empty and it uses the game's own footstep audio for the floor you're standing on, which is usually better.

Whispers/ is the folder that matters. Anything you drop in there plays at arm's length, quiet, barely filtered. If you want the mod to be genuinely convincing, record yourself whispering nonsense on your phone for two minutes, export as .ogg, and drop the files in. Real breath, real mouth noise, a real room — it will beat anything synthesised, and it takes five minutes.

If you download clips instead, check the licence before publishing a mod that contains them. freesound.org can filter to CC0, which is safe to ship.

• Delete anything you don't want. Add as many files as you like.
• Use .ogg or .wav. .mp3 is unreliable in Unity standalone builds — convert it first (Audacity: File → Export → OGG).
• Which folder a sound is in decides how far away and how loud it plays.
• Restart the game after changing files.

The mod muffles and reverbs everything at playback, so you don't need to process your recordings — a dry voice memo works fine.

VanillaShare sets the balance between the game's audio and this folder (0.35 by default — the borrowed set is deliberately small). 0 = only your clips, 1 = only game audio.

Voices

Voice clips only appear from Stage 2 onwards, and some get filtered to sound like they came over the walkie-talkie.

To tie clips to a specific person, put them in a subfolder named after them and turn on MatchVoicesToPlayerNames:

Sounds/Voices/
├── Sam/
│   ├── help.ogg
│   └── behind you.ogg
└── whisper.ogg          ← loose file, generic, always allowed

Sam/ clips then only play when a player called Sam is in the lobby. Keep at least a few loose files, or nothing will play when you're alone.

Testing it

Set EnableTestKey = true in the config first — the keys are off by default so a normal game has no hotkeys bound.

• F7 — the coilhead, right now, anywhere. Press it three times: you get the loud coil, then one running at you, then a burst of snaps. The log names each one as it plays.
• F8 — play a sound from your current stage right now, anywhere. This draws from the real distribution, so it's what Stage 3 actually sounds like rather than a greatest-hits reel.
• F10 — force a footstep sequence right now.
• F9 — jump to the next stage. Press three times for Stage 3, once more to reset. Stay in the dark and the next sound arrives in seconds.

Each press pushes the normal schedule back a few seconds, so what you hear is the key and not an ordinary event landing on top of it.

They're ignored while you're typing in chat or using the terminal.

If F10 says "no room to walk anywhere near you", you're in a space too tight for a walking path — step into a corridor and try again. If that happens everywhere, lower FootstepStartMin.

The BepInEx console reports ParanoidCompany v2.0.1 loaded, how many clips it found in each folder, and how many it borrowed from your game once you land.

Hearing nothing? Turn on DebugLogging and read the light score. If it never drops to 0.30 or below, the mod thinks you're never in the dark — raise DarknessThreshold until it matches the corridors you actually walk down.

Turn on DebugLogging to see your live light score, the state of the clock, and the muffling applied to each sound. That's how to tune DarknessThreshold: stand where you want it to trigger, read the number, set the threshold just above it.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.paranoidcompany.cfg

Presets

Slow burn — FirstSoundAfterSeconds = 90, Stage2AfterSeconds = 240, Stage3AfterSeconds = 450, Stage1MaxGap = 120

Constant company — Stage1MinGap = 12, Stage1MaxGap = 28, FlashlightClockRate = 1

Barely there — MuffleAmount = 0.9, ThroughWallChance = 0.7, Stage1Volume = 0.35, WhisperVolume = 0.45

Someone is definitely there — WhisperChance = 0.8, WhisperMaxDistance = 3.5, Stage1MinGap = 10, Stage1MaxGap = 25

No mercy — FlashlightClockRate = 1, LightResetSeconds = 300

Troubleshooting

I don't hear anything. Turn on DebugLogging and read the light score in the console. If it never drops to 0.30 or below, the mod thinks you are never in the dark — raise DarknessThreshold until it matches the corridors you actually walk down. Remember a lit room stops the clock and 45 seconds in the light resets it, so ferrying loot back to the ship keeps you at zero.

I never reach Stage 3. It needs 180 seconds of accumulated darkness, and your own torch runs the clock at half speed — so about six minutes of lamp-on exploring. Lower Stage3AfterSeconds or raise FlashlightClockRate if you want it sooner.

I only hear the coilhead / I never hear the coilhead. Press F7 (see above). The console prints every coilhead clip it found on your install, numbered with lengths, on every level load.

The sounds are too quiet / too loud. Stage1Volume, Stage2Volume, Stage3Volume, WhisperVolume, CoilheadVolume, DoorVolume — all separate.

Something specific is annoying me. Almost every category can be turned off on its own: FootstepsEnabled, DoorSoundChance = 0, WhisperChance = 0, UseVanillaSounds = false, or delete the offending files out of the Sounds folders.

Performance

Light list rebuilt every 8 seconds, a handful of distance checks twice a second. On very large interiors raise LightScanInterval or turn off RequireLineOfSight if you notice hitching.

Compatibility

• Built against the current Steam build of Lethal Company.
• No Harmony patches at all — it only reads public game state and plays its own audio, so it should survive game updates and won't fight other mods.
• If an update renames something it borrows, that one category drops out and the rest keeps working.
• Safe in vanilla lobbies: nothing networked, no game behaviour modified.

How this was made

This mod was built with AI assistance, and most of the files in it were AI-produced. The C# source, the 107 bundled sound files, the icon and this README were all written or generated by Claude, working from my design, my playtesting and my bug reports across a couple of dozen revisions.

Worth being precise about the audio, because "AI-generated sound" usually means something else: the clips are not from a generative audio model. They are procedural synthesis — vowel formants gliding into each other, consonants, breath and mouth noise, built from waveforms by a Python script that ships in the source repository. Same for the icon, which is drawn geometrically rather than by an image model. The script that does it was AI-written, hence the disclosure.

Nothing here is scraped, sampled or trained on anyone's recordings. The game audio the mod uses is read out of your own copy of Lethal Company at runtime and is never extracted or redistributed.

A horror mod, named for the atmosphere it's going for. It isn't a depiction of the real condition, which looks nothing like this.