Civic Volunteer

Adds Civic, a fourth roster shift alongside Free / Sleep / Work. Assign Civic hours and your character walks the station repairing public infrastructure — not your own hull — to work off the Altruism discomfort.

StatAltruism drifts upward at a flat +8.33/hr in real time with no shift-based offset at all, and it has the worst satisfy-to-frustrate ratio of any need in the game. Left alone, a captain pins at Greedy with nothing to do about it but hand out cigarettes. This gives you the honest alternative: put in a shift.

Charity counts for more the less you stand to gain

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're already Honored.

Faction standing rather than personal relationships, because the thing you're repairing is a station — there's nobody to have a relationship with.

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.

Changelog

1.0.1

• Store page text refresh. No code or data changes; the plugin and data pack are identical to 1.0.0.

1.0.0

• The data pack now installs itself. On Thunderstore the mod manager can only place files under BepInEx/, so the pack ships next to the plugin and the plugin copies it into Ostranauts_Data/Mods/VolunteerShift on startup. One manual step remains, by design: enable Civic Volunteer in the in-game MODS menu, then restart. The plugin never edits loading_order.json; the game owns that file.
• Copies are keyed on the pack version, so future updates refresh a stale pack automatically. Steam Workshop and manual installs are unaffected; the installer does nothing when the pack is not shipped next to the DLL.
• No gameplay changes since 0.1.0.

0.1.0 — first release

Adds Civic, a fourth roster shift alongside Free / Sleep / Work. On a Civic shift your character seeks out damaged public station infrastructure and repairs it, working off the Altruism discomfort.

Why

StatAltruism drifts upward at a flat +8.33/hr in real time with no shift-based offset, and has the worst satisfy-to-frustrate ratio of any need in the game — the only one where conversation moves that worsen it outnumber those that improve it. Left alone a character pins at the 240 cap. This adds an earned sink rather than retuning global constants.

Behaviour

• Only counts on hulls registered as orbital bodies — real stations. Other ships, salvage hulks and derelicts are excluded.
• You must be aboard; the mod will not path you across a docking port.
• Pays per repair action, scaled inversely with faction standing: charity counts for more the less you stand to gain from it. Repairing for a faction that dislikes you is worth double what the same work is worth where you're Honored.
• Fast-forwarded Civic hours pay a flat hourly payload instead, so the shift works whether you play it out or skip it — but playing it out comes out ahead.
• Studying is suppressed during a Civic shift. It raises Altruism by 6, which would undo roughly 20 repair actions, and it gets more likely the better the shift is going.

Requires

BepInEx, plus the VolunteerShift data pack copied into Ostranauts_Data/Mods/ and enabled in the in-game MODS menu. The plugin logs a clear error on shift entry if the data pack is missing.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.ostranauts.volunteer.cfg — AltruismPerRepairAction (default 0.2) sets how much altruism each repair action works off before the faction multiplier. 0 pays 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.