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.

Changelog

2.0.1

• Replaced the example player name used throughout the documentation and in the MatchVoicesToPlayerNames setting description with a neutral one. It was a real person's name, and config descriptions get written to disk on every install.
• The plugin identifier changed, so the settings file is now BepInEx/config/com.paranoidcompany.cfg. If you installed 2.0.0, it wrote a settings file under the old identifier and that one is now orphaned — the other .cfg in BepInEx/config with "paranoidcompany" in its name can simply be deleted. Nothing else changed; the mod behaves identically.

2.0.0

Renamed to Paranoid Company. Same mod, clearer name — the old one described the symptom rather than what the mod does to you. The plugin, its folder and its config file are all renamed to match, so the settings live in BepInEx/config/com.paranoidcompany.cfg.

Pre-release audit. Four independent review passes over the whole codebase before publishing. Nothing here changes how the mod feels — it is the pass that makes sure it behaves the same on the hundredth round as on the first.

• A test press is now heard on its own. The ordinary schedule could fire a whisper a second after you pressed a key, and a breath arriving right behind a coilhead reads as part of what the key played. Test keys now push the natural schedule back a few seconds. (If you heard "breathing" after pressing F7 — that was a real, separate whisper event landing on top. It's one of the mod's own breathing clips, not part of the coilhead.)
• Your own flashlight no longer counts as a lit room. A flashlight carries a second "glow" light at the lamp itself, which isn't caught by the beam-cone test and sat half a metre from your eyes — reading as bright lighting and stopping the dark clock outright, instead of halving it the way FlashlightClockRate intends.
• Lights on other players' bodies — including the radar light the ship monitor switches on remotely — can no longer read as a lamp beside your face and silently stop your clock.
• A dead spectator was placed at their own corpse: every sound spawned out of earshot, and the darkness was measured where the body fell. It now listens from the spectate camera. PlayWhileDead also could not produce a single sound at all, because the game reports a dead player as being outside the facility.
• Setting OnlyInsideFacility = false did nothing on its own — the sun counted as full daylight at any brightness, so outdoors was always "lit". The config now warns about the pair of settings involved.
• An exception during scene load could have aborted the remaining load handlers of every other mod after this one. Wrapped.
• "Nothing loaded" warnings stayed silent after the first lobby of a session.
• The vanilla harvest is bounded to at most three spaced retries per level.
• Internals: the duplicated pool-reset in two places is now one method — adding a pool and updating only one copy would have leaked audio from an unloaded level into the next round. Dead per-clip pitch field removed. Light scanning no longer allocates on every scan.

1.9.1

The test key was lying to you.

• F7 played the single loud coil and nothing else, on every press. It was hard-wired to one form, so pressing it repeatedly gave the same clip every time — which looks exactly like the running and burst forms don't exist. It now cycles: 1st press = the loud coil, 2nd = one running at you, 3rd = a burst of snaps closing in, and the log names each one as it plays.
• A press can no longer answer with silence. If the room is too tight to run in, it says so and plays the coil instead of doing nothing.
• Failure messages now distinguish "no clips found" from "no room here" — those need completely different fixes and the old message sent you looking for a bigger room when the pool was empty.

About "no other coilhead sounds": that is the game, not the mod. The vanilla Coil-Head has exactly two audio fields — its spring noises and one cooldown clip — and its walking sound is those same spring noises, fired once every time it lurches forward. There is no separate footstep or rattle layer anywhere in the game files. So a running coilhead genuinely is the spring set played rapidly as it closes, which is what the mod now does. The three forms differ in arrangement and placement, not in source material, because vanilla has no other material.

• The mod now also reads the coilhead prefab's PlayAudioAnimationEvent components — the clips an animation itself fires — in case a future version or another mod adds a real movement layer. Deliberately not a blind sweep of every AudioSource on the prefab: a stray hit or death sting played as something walking towards you is worse than nothing. If it finds one it uses it; the log says which way it went.
• The running form now walks the full spring set rather than only the short clips, which is what the real one does.
• Recognises the coilhead under Coil-Head and Coilhead as well as Spring — the wrong name silently skipped the whole movement sweep.
• The movement sweep is isolated in its own error handler, so a renamed field there can no longer cost the mod its spring clips.
• One stray clip no longer counts as a movement layer; it takes at least two.

1.9.0

Stage 3 is not just the coilhead. And the coilhead now runs at you.

The bug behind "at Stage 3 I only hear the coilhead"

• The once-per-run "first Stage 3 moment is always the coil" clause was tested without checking whether the event was a test-key press — and a test press never spends the clause. So every F8 at Stage 3 re-entered the signature branch at 100%, forever: 80% coilhead, 20% ghost girl, and the door, the whispers and the entire general pool were unreachable. Fixed.
• The same latch could happen in normal play: the clause was spent only when the loud coil specifically played, so if that one form kept failing while another succeeded, every Stage 3 event was locked into the signature branch for the rest of the round. Now any signature that actually reaches the speakers spends it — and a failure still spends nothing, so a busy channel can't quietly eat your guaranteed first coil.
• The vanilla Stage 3 pool is often empty — it is fed almost entirely by the outdoor insanity ambience, which is one clip or none. When it was empty the mod walked down a stage, and volume and distance are taken from the clip's own stage, so a Stage 3 moment quietly became a distant Stage 1 creak. It now takes the same stage from the other source first.
• The ghost girl was the half of the signature nobody registered. She went through the ordinary path — 2.5–8 m, low-passed, through the game's reverb bus — while the coil played dry at arm's length. She now gets her own close, clean placement.

Steady-state Stage 3 is now roughly 62% general pool and whispers, 16% a real door, 18% coilhead, 4% the ghost girl — and F8 samples exactly that.

Coilhead: all of it, including running

• A coilhead running at you. Its own movement audio, closing from up to 11 m behind over 4–16 lurching steps, muffled at the far end and opening up as it comes — ending on the loud coil as it stops dead. That is the shape of the real encounter, and it is the only form that gives you a second of "something is coming" first.
• Three forms now — loud coil / running / burst — picked by weight (CoilheadLoudChance, CoilheadRunShare, CoilheadBurstShare), never the same form twice in a row, and each falls back sideways rather than always collapsing onto the loud coil in a tight corridor.
• Movement audio is taken from the coilhead prefab's own AudioSources and its EnemyType.audioClips, vanilla coilheads only. If the prefab has none, the run is built from its springs instead and the log says so.

Fixes found by a full audit

• A clip whose audio data isn't resident reports a length and plays silence — it was being logged as played and heard as nothing. Those events are now skipped rather than wasted, and a footstep sequence with no loaded clips no longer holds a channel to emit nothing.
• An exception anywhere in the tick aborted it before the clock advanced — every frame, for the rest of the session, leaving the mod silent while the log filled. The tick and the key handler are both guarded now.
• MaxSimultaneousSounds = 1 silently deleted every delayed payoff (the coil at the end of a run, the door shutting again). Never runs below two channels now, and the setting's description was simply wrong.
• Cutting audio short left our own queued sounds alive — a killed run's coil landed on top of whatever came next.
• A step sequence released its channel after a fixed 0.6 s, so a long clip's tail was still ringing when the next sound reconfigured the channel underneath it and audibly jumped across the room.
• The running coilhead was repitching its own still-ringing steps into a warble.
• FootstepEndDistance below 0.8 (a legal value) made every approaching footstep event fail, silently and forever.
• Doors were unavailable for the first 20 s of a level, because the first scan ran before the dungeon existed and then cached the empty result.
• With an empty Sounds/Whispers folder, one borrowed 3.5 s breathing loop became nearly half of everything you heard.
• Files with # in the name never loaded.
• A property getter was consuming a retry counter as a side effect.

1.8.0

The coil, and doors that are actually there.

Coilhead

• The loud coil is now the Stage 3 moment, and the first one of a run is guaranteed. It plays the longest vanilla spring noise dead behind you at 0.6–3 m — dry, at full volume, with no low-pass, outside the game's reverb bus, at an audio priority Unity will not cull. Everything that makes the rest of the mod deniable is deliberately switched off for this one sound.
• Three chained probabilities used to leave it at roughly a 6% share of Stage 3 events, so a player could go many rounds without ever hearing it. The first Stage 3 event is now unconditionally the coil, and the guarantee is spent only if the coil actually played — previously a ghost-girl sting could burn it silently.
• Coilhead audio is now harvested from every moon's spawn table, not just from coilheads loaded into the level you happen to be on. Before this, a moon where none had spawned yet had no coilhead audio at all for the whole round.
• The cooldown clip no longer competes to be "the loud one" — it's the coilhead winding down, longer and softer, and it was winning a pure length contest.
• A reskin mod's spring clips are collected but never preferred, for the burst as well as the loud slot.
• New CoilheadClipIndex: the log now prints every coilhead clip it found, numbered and with lengths, on every level load. Set this to one of those numbers to always use that exact clip.
• New F7 test key plays the loud coil instantly, anywhere (needs EnableTestKey).

Doors

• Fake door creaks and slams, played from the world position of a door that is really standing there — and never at all when nothing near you is a door. A door creaking in a corridor with no door in it is the moment somebody stops believing any of it.
• Prefers doors you are not looking at, sometimes shuts the same door a second or two later, and is occluded and distance-attenuated like everything else.
• Tunable: DoorSoundChance, DoorMinDistance, DoorMaxDistance, DoorVolume, DoorOpenShare, DoorPairChance.

Fixes

• Every hallucination was at audio priority 200 — the back of Unity's voice budget. In a facility full of machinery and enemy audio, sounds were being virtualised: still reported as playing, but emitting nothing. This is likely behind more than one "I didn't hear anything" report.
• Stage 2 could end up empty on a moon with no ambience library, once doors and the coilhead cooldown clip moved to their own pools; ship creaks and drags are now split across Stage 1 and 2, alternating on clips actually accepted rather than on array position.
• A delayed door shut can no longer play into an unloaded level, after death, or back on the ship.
• Test keys F7/F10 are wrapped like F8; a bad CoilheadKey is now reported.

1.7.1

The loud coil.

• The coilhead's spring noises were only used if they were shorter than 1.5 seconds, because they are fired a tenth of a second apart in the burst and anything longer smears into mush. Any longer clip was simply thrown away — and the long one is the loud coil lunge, the single most recognisable sound a coilhead makes. It now gets its own moment instead: one loud coil, close, behind you, at full volume with its top end intact, no burst and no ramp.
• New CoilheadLoudChance (default 0.45) picks between that and the burst of short snaps. If the game's spring clips are all short, nothing changes and you always get the burst; if they are all long — which would previously have meant no coilhead at all — you always get the loud one.
• The startup log now reports snap and loud-coil counts separately, and with DebugLogging on prints every borrowed spring clip with its length, so it is possible to see exactly what the mod found on your install.

1.7.0

Only the sounds you can't put a name to.

• Removed most of the borrowed game audio. Gone: the maneater's infant crying, death screams, gore, laughter, walkie-talkie chatter and radio voice, grabs and shoves, and monster voices (ExtraEnemyVoices now defaults off). Every one of them is instantly identifiable, and a player who can name the sound has stopped being unsettled and started thinking the mod is broken.
• What the game still lends, all ambiguous by design: the coilhead's spring burst, the ghost girl's breathing / skipping / staring sting, the insanity ambience, hull and door creaks, doors shutting, something dragging, the level's own ambient one-shots, and real per-surface footsteps.
• VanillaShare dropped to 0.35, since the borrowed set is now much smaller and the 107 bundled clips should carry more of the round.
• Coilhead detection made bulletproof. It no longer depends on matching a guessed enemy-name string — a rename in a game update would have silently deleted the mod's best moment. It now matches the component type exactly, which also still blocks modded coilhead variants. Verified against the game assembly: SpringManAI has no subclasses, so this cannot false-negative.
• Fixes: Stage 3's borrowed pool was left with a single outdoor ambience source while the mod only plays indoors, so its late-game sounds quietly degraded into Stage 2 door shuts — the indoor bed is now split across both stages; the ghost girl's breathing was surfacing about once every ten minutes because two pools were mixed by raw clip count, and is now properly weighted; a moon with no ambience library caused two extra full object-graph scans right as you stepped off the ramp; multi-minute ambience beds were being fully decoded when only four seconds are ever played; the coilhead warning could log three times per landing. Removed a dead initializer, a no-op wrapper in the light sensor, five now-unused harvest methods and three of the five object scans.
• Documentation: the README advertised the removed content, and the UseVanillaSounds config description — which is written into every user's config file on first launch — still mentioned death screams.

1.6.2

Running is guaranteed at Stage 3, and the coilhead now snaps properly.

• The coilhead arrives as a burst. Three to five spring noises in rapid succession, directly behind you, closing from about five metres in to a metre and a half — the way a real one sounds when it decides to move. Previously it was a single isolated click from the same clip gallery, which is easy to miss and easier to dismiss.
• Running was never guaranteed — now it is. A realistic round only produced about 1.3 running events and one round in five had none at all, because Stage 3 footsteps were a 70% roll on an already-rare event. The first Stage 3 footstep event now always sprints, and after that it's 90% (RunChanceAtStage3).
• The first Stage 3 sound is always a signature, so reaching Stage 3 announces itself instead of quietly maybe happening. Previously 14% of rounds that reached Stage 3 never heard a coilhead at all.
• Fixes found in review: overlapping snaps in the burst were retuning each other's pitch mid-flight and stacking to well past full volume — the burst now pins its pitch, spaces itself against the clips' own length, and plays quieter per snap; the burst could be emitted from inside a wall, and now searches up to five directions for a clear one and gives up rather than clipping through; modded coilhead variants can no longer put their audio a metre behind your head (vanilla-only, same rule as the other creatures); burst clips are capped at 1.5 s so they can't pile up or hold the channel; and the F8/F10 test keys no longer spend the once-per-round guarantees.

1.6.1

Rebalanced: rarer, less predictable footsteps; more ambience.

• Footsteps are rarer and no longer on a rhythm. The timer comes round every 36–72 seconds instead of 28–60, and when it does there is only a 72% chance it actually fires (FootstepChance). Two skips in a row is a long, pointed silence — and it means you can never learn when to expect them. In practice that is roughly one footstep event for every four other sounds, down from one in three.
• Ambience and voices pick up the slack. Gaps tightened across all three stages (Stage 1 now 12–26 s), so the overall rate is unchanged — about one sound every thirty seconds in a normal round, one every thirteen if you stand in the dark on purpose. Same density, weighted much further towards the quiet unsettling material and away from footsteps.

1.6.0

Balance pass, and a pre-publish audit.

• Footsteps are less frequent and further off — every 28–60 s instead of 18–40, beginning 9–20 m away and stopping about 5 m from you rather than walking into your face.
• Half of them now start around a corner. The walk begins just past a wall, out of sight, heavily muffled, and the filter opens up as it comes into the open. That is the difference between "a sound played" and "somebody is coming".
• Fixed the phantom sprinting. The number of steps was fixed while the distance varied, so a walk could cover ten metres in four steps — about 9 m/s. Steps now follow a real stride, so it moves at a human pace.
• The coilhead is guaranteed at Stage 3. Its spring noises and the ghost girl's sting now live in a reserved pool, drawn about one Stage 3 sound in three (SignatureChance), instead of being two clips among dozens.
• No ship voice. The Company announcer, the "you're fired" voice and the all-dead announcement are no longer borrowed at all. The game's scored music is out too — you recognise those instantly, and recognition is the opposite of the point.
• Creature audio is limited to vanilla enemies, so a modded lobby can't inject arbitrary clips into your dark corridor.
• Debug keys are off by default (EnableTestKey), and are ignored while you're typing in chat or using the terminal.
• Fixes: a level with no ambience library sent the mod into a full audio re-scan twice a second for the entire round; an around-the-corner start could land inside solid rock; FlashlightClockRate = 0 left stale "time spent in light" credit that could trigger a false reset; footstep failures now say whether it was geometry or a busy channel; a bad FootstepKey binding warns like the others; config ranges that allowed self-breaking values were tightened. Removed dead code: Plugin.Instance, SchizoManager.Instance, DarknessSensor.LastScore, and a duplicate object scan during harvesting.

1.5.0

Footsteps have their own clock, sounds no longer overlap, and the schedule stopped sabotaging itself.

• Fixed the bug that made everything rare. When a sound was already playing, the next event was pushed back cumulatively — every tick added another two seconds. A three-second sound could cost ten seconds of extra silence, and the deficit compounded across a whole stage. That was the single biggest reason so little was happening.
• Footsteps are separated out completely. Their own folder (Sounds/Footsteps/), their own schedule, their own distances, their own config section. They start at 12 seconds of darkness and repeat every 18–40 s, independent of everything else, so they never have to win a coin toss against a whisper.
• Fixed footsteps almost never playing. They were using the Stage 1 distance of 16–30 m, so the walk had to start thirty metres away — indoors the raycast hit a wall two metres out and the whole sequence was abandoned. They now start 5–13 m away, and if the first direction is blocked the mod tries five more before giving up rather than losing the event.
• One sound at a time. Two hallucinations overlapping read as a glitch, so nothing starts while something else is still audible (OneSoundAtATime). LayerChance — the deliberate double-sound — now defaults to off.
• More to hear. Roughly 25 sounds across a normal round, up from about 10. Sounds also play closer and louder: Stage 1 moved from 16–30 m to 7–17 m, and the muffling was reduced.
• Added F10 to force a footstep sequence for testing, and F8/F10 now clear any playing sound first so a test never produces the overlap artefact.
• Fixes: a failed coroutine start could reserve a sound channel permanently and silence the mod for the rest of the round; a long file dropped into a Sounds folder could hold a channel for minutes and block everything else (there is now a hard cap, MaxSoundSeconds); null entries in a floor's footstep array made silent steps; footsteps bypassed the game's audio mixer until the first voice played, so they were louder and drier than everything else; UseGameFootsteps = false still used the game's footsteps; footstep failures are now logged under DebugLogging instead of failing silently.

1.4.0

Whispers are now the point of the mod, and they finally work.

• Fixed the reason you couldn't hear any whispering. Whispers were being placed 16–30 m away like every other sound. A whisper at that distance is physically inaudible — that is what a whisper is. Close human sounds now have their own folder and their own rules: they play 1.5–6 m from you, at their own volume, and they are never put behind a wall or filtered below 5.2 kHz (whispering lives between 1 and 5 kHz, so rolling that off leaves nothing).
• 46 new whisper clips in Sounds/Whispers/ — whispering short and long, urgent whispering, close breathing, humming, swallowing. A different speaker every clip. WhisperChance defaults to 0.45, so a close human sound is now the single most common thing you hear, at every stage.
• Far more real recorded audio borrowed from your game: the ghost girl's breathing, the maneater's infant crying, laughter, walkie-talkie clicks and radio voice, a death over the radio, real recorded speech dropped an octave into unintelligible muttering — and the game's own insanity ambience, played as a few seconds lifted out of the middle and faded. Nothing this mod could synthesise fits Lethal Company better than the audio written for exactly this feeling.
• You will hear things much sooner. DarknessThreshold was far too strict — a normal unlit facility corridor never actually measured as "dark". Raised from 0.15 to 0.3. First sound at 20 s of darkness (was 30), Stage 2 at 90 s, Stage 3 at 180 s, and all the gaps tightened.
• Removed the organic / "bacteria" textures.
• Fixes: layered second sounds went through a separate code path that ignored every whisper rule and never faded long clips — all playback now goes through one path, which also stops multi-minute ambience beds permanently occupying the sound channels and silencing the mod mid-round; clips reached by two routes are no longer filed twice, so a close voice can't come back as a distant one; a clip substituted from a higher stage no longer arrives louder and closer than the moment called for; whispers are reachable as a fallback, so a Whispers-only install is no longer silent half the time; unloaded audio data is requested rather than played as silence; the insanity ambience is retried if the level wasn't ready on the first look; a stale fade can no longer cut off an unrelated later sound.

1.3.0

83 sounds, all muffled, never the same twice, and timed to an actual round.

• Pacing rebuilt around a real Lethal Company day. A day is only about eleven real minutes, so the old thresholds were unreachable. Stage 1 now starts at 30 seconds of darkness, Stage 2 at 100, Stage 3 at 200, with tighter gaps. All three play styles — no light, torch on the whole time, or a normal mix — now reach Stage 3 inside a single day.
• Your torch no longer stops the clock, it halves it (FlashlightClockRate). A lit room still stops it outright. Carrying a light buys you time; it doesn't make you safe. Set the rate to 0 for the old behaviour — it now freezes progress rather than eventually wiping it.
• Everything is muffled now. A randomised low-pass on every play, so sounds arrive through walls and distance instead of sitting on top of the mix (MuffleAmount). About a third of the time the sound is deliberately placed in the next room, where a real wall rolls the top end off further (ThroughWallChance).
• No two plays are alike: randomised pitch, loudness, muffling, direction, distance, and a chance the clip starts partway in so you only catch the end of it. Sometimes a second, quieter sound plays underneath from elsewhere (LayerChance).
• New sound library — 83 clips, all human-focused. Whispering rebuilt with breath before phrases, mouth clicks between words, swallows, phrase-final lengthening and a different speaker every clip (voice pitch, vocal tract length, pace, breathiness all vary). New: humming, cloth shifting, joint cracks, and distant murmuring crowds.
• Removed the long synthetic scream. Replaced with short, half-swallowed cries from further in the building — plus the game's own real death scream.
• Fixes: DarknessThreshold = 0 no longer disables the mod entirely; approaching footsteps can no longer be mirrored to the wrong side of the player in a cramped corridor, and the "no room to walk" bail-out now actually fires; sounds can no longer be placed just past a wall they hit; toggling UseVanillaSounds on mid-round now takes effect; changing MaxSimultaneousSounds mid-round no longer cuts off a playing sound; a warning is logged when voice name-matching filters out every clip.

1.2.0

Now uses the game's own audio, and the footsteps walk.

• The mod borrows AudioClips already loaded in your game rather than shipping copies: the real coilhead spring noises, the ghost girl's breathing and staring stings, real door creaks and shuts, drag sounds, death screams, and a capped selection of other creature voices. Nothing is extracted or redistributed, and it always matches your game version.
• Phantom footsteps. Instead of a single clip, an event can now spawn a moving line of footsteps that walks across the room behind you or straight towards you and then stops. They use the game's real footstep audio for the exact floor surface you are standing on. At Stage 3 they run.
• Rebuilt the synthesised sounds from scratch around actual voice synthesis: whispering now uses measured vowel formants with glides between them, consonants, and a weak voiced component, so it sounds like a person saying something you can't make out rather than filtered noise.
• New: distant murmuring (several people talking further in), sighs, human screams with vocal roughness and a pitch break, and wet organic textures.
• Removed the old metallic synthetic clips — the game's own audio covers that material far better.
• New config section for game audio: UseVanillaSounds, VanillaShare, ExtraEnemyVoices, PhantomFootstepChance, WalkStepInterval, RunStepInterval.
• Fixes: footstep paths are validated against geometry at both ends, so a narrow corridor no longer collapses a walking sequence into a single point or reverses its direction; footsteps sit at floor height instead of an arbitrary drop from the camera; footstep volume is no longer applied twice; borrowed clips are dropped on scene change; turning UseVanillaSounds off now takes effect immediately; a sound channel can no longer be reserved permanently.

1.1.0

Reworked around a slow escalation instead of random rolls.

• A single clock now drives everything: seconds spent in the dark. Nothing happens for the first minute.
• Three stages — Stage 1 at 1 minute (far, subtle), Stage 2 at 4 minutes (close), Stage 3 at 8 minutes (running footsteps, coilhead snapping).
• Sounds are scheduled rather than rolled, so they stay sparse: roughly one every 45–110 seconds at Stage 1, tightening as it escalates. No more spam.
• Stepping into light pauses the clock. It only resets after a full minute in the light — a quick trip through a lit corridor no longer saves you.
• Distance and volume are now per stage: Stage 1 plays 16–30 m away and quiet, Stage 3 plays 4–12 m away and loud.
• Sounds are biased behind the player, more strongly at higher stages.
• New sound library, all synthesised in a concrete-room reverb: unintelligible whispers with real formant movement, distant and close footsteps, running footsteps that approach, coilhead neck-snapping, breathing, scrapes, creaks, a distant scream. Short, natural, no long hisses.
• Sound folders are now Stage1 / Stage2 / Stage3 / Voices. An older Ambient folder still loads as Stage 1.
• Voices only appear from Stage 2 onwards and take the intensity of the moment they arrive in.
• Added F9 to jump straight to the next stage for testing.
• Config warns on startup if the stage thresholds are ordered in a way that would silently disable a stage.
• Fixes: light cache is rebuilt on scene change and when entering the facility; spotlights now respect their cone; teammates' lamps count as light again; playing sounds are stopped on scene change; one stray lit sample can no longer wipe your progress; the schedule can no longer be stranded by an exception.

1.0.0

• First release.