Helmet HUD — Ostranauts

A green monochrome suit readout drawn inside your visor while wearing a powered pressure or EVA helmet. It's anchored to the helmet frame, so it rides the visor's cursor parallax and drifts off the screen edge with the rest of the helmet — it reads as part of the suit, not as a UI overlay.

Right-justified text traces the visor rim (a quadratic fitted to the helmet artwork), shows negative statuses and anything you're actively training, and auto-pages when there's more than fits.

The pressure suit helmet also gets a battery. Its gauge cluster runs off a pair of BB cells seated in the neck ring, and they run down while you wear it — flat cells mean a dark visor, the vanilla O2 and CO2 warnings included.

The cluster's own panel is redrawn to carry four annunciators instead of two: vanilla's O2 LOW and CO2 HIGH, plus POWER (lit green while the cells are running the gauges) and CHNG BATT (amber, flashing when they're nearly out). Unlit lamps still show their lens colour, so the panel reads as hardware rather than a row of dead sockets. The legends are painted into the panel art, which is what makes them readable when the cells die and everything else goes dark.

BB cells stack four to a holder, so you can pack spares into the helmet for a long EVA — twice the cells is twice the endurance. Set CellHours to 0 if you'd rather cells never deplete, or RequireBatteries to false to switch the whole mechanic off.

Companion to Character Sidebar, which shows the same character data in a full panel outside of EVA. Either works alone; they compose if you run both.

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 Helmet HUD, and restart.

Skip the enable step and the visor readout still works, but the helmet has no battery holder, no redrawn gauge panel and no glow; the log says exactly what is missing.

Build

Needs OSTRANAUTS_PATH set and the Character Sidebar repo checked out alongside this one:

C:\Claude\Ostranauts Mods\
    Ostranauts Status Sidebar\    <- shared src/Data/*.cs comes from here
    Ostranauts Helmet HUD\        <- this repo

dotnet build -c Release deploys to BepInEx/plugins/OstranautsHelmetHUD/.

The shared data layer (CharacterDataReader, CharacterSnapshot, ModLog) is compiled in from the sidebar tree via a linked <Compile Include> rather than copied — one source of truth, two fully independent DLLs, no runtime dependency in either direction.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.ostranauts.helmethud.cfg. Editable with the BepInEx Configuration Manager (F1) if you have it installed, otherwise edit the file and relaunch:

• Behaviour — Enabled, OnPressureSuits, RequireBatteries (the survival mechanic), CellHours (how long a set of cells lasts; 0 = never run down), CellsRequired, StockOldHelmets (fit cells to helmets that predate the mod)
• Display — BlinkCritical, ReferenceHeight
• Placement — RectX/Y/W/H (fractions of the helmet frame), EdgeInset (how far inside the rim the text sits), GaugeSocketX/Top/Pitch/Size (where the four gauge lamps sit, as fractions of the panel art — only worth touching if you redraw that art)
• Paging — MaxRowsEVA (6; EVA bars fill the rim), MaxRowsPressureSuit (18; only two gauge lamps down low), PageSeconds

Changelog

Helmet HUD 1.0.1: 2026-08-21

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

Helmet HUD 1.0.0: 2026-08-21

• 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/HelmetHUD on startup. One manual step remains, by design: enable Helmet HUD 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.

Helmet HUD 0.1.0: 2026-08-21

Adds a green monochrome suit readout drawn inside the visor while wearing a powered pressure or EVA helmet. The HUD shows negative statuses and anything you're actively training. Different helmets have different HUDs to accommodate the life support readouts on the EVA helmet. Oh! and Pressure suit helmets now require batteries to be more logical inside the game system. Make sure that Power light is on, and pay attention for blinking amber battery lights.

Alongside Character Sidebar

If you also run Character Sidebar, the sidebar folds itself away to its side tab while your helmet is up, and unfolds when it comes off. Neither mod requires the other.