Civic Volunteer

Adds a fourth roster shift, Civic, alongside Free / Sleep / Work.

Feeling a little Greedy? Having trouble keeping your Altruism Stat from tanking after a couple of runs? Tired of passing out cigarettes around the station like a villain from a 1990s PSA ad? Try a Civic Shift!

On a Civic shift your character seeks out damaged public station infrastructure and repairs it, out of the goodness of their heart. Not only will this build faction reputation with the station you're working on, your character will feel genuinely good about helping out around the station!

What does it actually do?

To be more straightforward, this mod adds a fourth shift called Civic that provides a way for your character to genuinely work off the Altruism discomfort without completely bricking the stat. While volunteering a character will attempt to repair nearby infrastructure gaining small amounts of altruism for work done and work complete, while negating the passive drift that otherwise drifts upward at a flat +8.33/hr in real time with no shift-based offset at all.

The reward scales inversely with your standing with the station's faction. Repairing for people who dislike you is worth double what the same work is worth somewhere you are already Honored.

Real-time Civic hours pay per repair. Fast-forwarded hours pay a flat hourly payload instead, so the shift works either way — but playing it out comes out ahead.

Install

This mod is two parts, a plugin and a native data pack, and both install themselves. The one manual step is enabling the data pack in the game's MODS menu, which only the game itself is allowed to do.

1. Click Install in the Thunderstore Mod Manager (r2modman). BepInEx and the plugin are set up automatically.
2. Launch the game once. The plugin copies its data pack into Ostranauts_Data/Mods/ on startup and logs that it did.
3. From the main menu open MODS, enable Civic Volunteer, and restart.

If the data pack is missing anyway, the plugin says so in the log the first time a Civic shift starts, including exactly what to fix.

Using it

Set some hours to Civic in the Roster screen (click an hour cell to cycle through Free → Sleep → Work → Civic), then make sure that character has:

• AI Auto enabled
• Restore permission granted in the roster

Both are vanilla gates on the auto-task system — without them the character will stand around, and the log will tell you which one is missing.

Your character must also be aboard the station. The mod won't path you across a docking port; walk over yourself and the AI takes it from there.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.ostranauts.volunteer.cfg

• AltruismPerRepairAction (default 0.2) — altruism worked off per repair action, before the faction multiplier. Set 0 to pay only on completed repairs.

Uninstalling

Saves with Civic hours assigned expect the fourth shift to exist. Set those hours back to Free before uninstalling, or the save will error on load.