PEAK RANKED

A ranked ladder for PEAK. ELO, monthly seasons, a daily cup everyone climbs together and 1v1 ghost duels — with a proper speedrun timer running underneath all of it.

⚠️ Beta. While the version starts with 0., scoring rules can still change and leaderboards may be reset. Bug reports are very welcome.

🤖 Built with AI assistance

This mod was written by one person with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant. That is stated here, in the mod's HUD during every run, and in the main menu — openly, because when it came up, a few people were genuinely upset about it.

For six months, nobody built this. So it got built the way one person could actually build it: with an AI as a co-pilot, a lot of coffee and not enough sleep.

By installing, you are acknowledging: yes, an AI helped write this. If that is a dealbreaker for you, no hard feelings — nobody is making you install it. If it is not, the mountain is waiting.

Climb for a rating

Everyone starts at 1000 ELO and UNRANKED. Your first three scored runs are placement runs; after them you get a rank, and the sign in the main menu shows where you stand.

Every rank has three sub-levels — except PEAK LEGEND, which has no ceiling and no sub-levels. You are either there or you are not.

Above 2000 ELO the mountain expects you to keep climbing. After seven days without a scored run, ratings in SHERPA and PEAK LEGEND decay by 10 a day. Below 2000, nothing decays — the grind is for the top, not for everyone.

Seasons

A season is a calendar month. It ends on the 1st at 17:00 UTC, and the main menu shows which season is running and how long it has left, on its own sign under the map rotation.

When a season ends:

• The final standings go into the Hall of Fame, unchanged for good.
• Ratings are soft reset — moved halfway back toward 1200, not wiped. A SHERPA starts the new season ahead of a SCOUT, but not so far ahead that the season is decided in advance.

DAILY CUP — the main event

Everyone in the world gets the same mountain and the same seed, once a day. The day ends at 17:00 UTC, and then it is scored:

• Where you placed decides your ELO. With fewer than 50 entrants the bands are fixed places; from 50 up they become percentiles, because "top 5%" of eight people is nobody.
• The bottom half always loses rating. A cup you show up for and coast through is not free ELO.
• A personal best on the day is worth +10 on top, once per day. Beating yourself counts even on a day when everyone else was faster.

1V1 GHOST DUEL

You are matched against someone near your rating, and you race their ghost on their seed. Classic ELO, K-factor 20 — beating someone far above you moves your rating a lot, beating someone far below you barely moves it.

Duels are not zero-sum: only the active climber's rating changes. Your ghost cannot lose you rating while you are asleep.

Every mode at a glance

Ghosts, not route lines

A translucent climber runs the route alongside you — your own best attempt, or anyone else's from the leaderboard. Not a glowing line on the rock: an actual figure, animated from the recording, holding the item they were holding at that point in the climb.

You can see when they pulled out the rope. That is usually the thing you were missing.

Opacity is adjustable, and the whole thing can be switched off if it distracts you.

See what your opponent is actually doing

In a duel or in training, a small panel shows the other climber's state — read from their recording, drawn in the game's own colours:

• Their clock, and how much they have left before they finish
• Stamina, with the status effects eating into it: poison, cold, hunger, injury, each in the colour the game itself uses
• Adrenaline, when they have any
• Their inventory as icons — what is in hand, on the belt, and in their backpack (and which backpack, because a rocket is not a fanny pack)

In a Live Race the same information appears for every participant, compact enough to stay readable with eight of them.

And in a Live Race you can see them. Everyone runs the same mountain from the same seed and starts in the same moment, so a rival's position means the same thing in your world as in theirs — they simply appear in it, climbing as they climb. The host turns this on when creating the race (SHOW RIVALS); with it off, only the standings are shared. The four nearest rivals are drawn, fading out with distance.

The timer underneath all of it

Every mode runs on the same timer, and it is built to speedrunning conventions rather than to a stopwatch you start by hand.

The clock starts when you do — not when the level finishes loading, not when the intro ends, but on your first input, the moment you actually have control. That is the speedrun.com rule, and it is what makes a time here comparable to a time anywhere else.

From there it handles itself:

• Automatic splits at every campfire, named the way the game names them — SHORE, ROOTS, ALPINE, GLOOM, THE CITADEL.
• Live comparison against your reference run, green ahead and red behind, plus the sum of your best segments — the theoretical best you have already proven you can climb.
• A run only counts if you finish alive. Dying at the helicopter is a death, not a finish.

The SPEEDRUN mode exists for exactly this: your seed, your map, your rules, no rating at stake. It has its own board, filterable by map and route.

Sections are their own category. A single-biome mini-run takes a fraction of a full ascent, so it never competes with one — and it is ranked by biome name, not section number, because section 2 is TROPICS on one mountain and ROOTS on another.

Vanilla stays vanilla

Start from the left signpost — PLAY OFFLINE or HOST GAME — and the mod gets out of the way. You still get the timer, because timing never hurts. You do not get seed control, ghosts, or a leaderboard entry, and the panel says so in plain words rather than letting you think a time counted when it did not.

Getting started

1. Install through a mod manager (r2modman or Gale). BepInExPack_PEAK comes with it.
2. Launch PEAK. There is a second signpost on the right side of the main menu.
3. Pick DAILY CUP and climb. Three runs later you have a rank.

The presentation is configurable in game — key bindings, which panels are visible, and where each one sits. Drag a panel with the mouse and drop it where you want it; while you are placing it, it shows its largest possible size, so it will not grow over something else later.

The rules are not. When the clock starts and how the items are rolled are the same for everyone, because a leaderboard can only compare runs made under the same rules.

The mod follows the game's language setting: German gets German, everything else English.

Fair play

Your other mods are switched off while a scored run is active, and come back when you return to the main menu. That applies to every start from the PEAK RANKED signs — Daily Cup, duel, ghost training, speedrun, race — and to nothing else: start from the left signpost and your setup is untouched. Which mods may keep running anyway is decided by an allowlist on the server, not per player, so the same rules apply to everyone on the board. If a mod of yours belongs on that list, say so on Discord.

Times are submitted with the map, the seed, the ascent level, the game version and the list of mods that were loaded. Runs are checked on the server: split times have to be internally consistent, and each section has a minimum duration calibrated against real world-record runs.

During a scored run the mod also records game-state signals for the fairness check, alongside the trajectory it records anyway for your ghost. It looks for effects the game itself cannot produce: stamina that stops draining while you climb, a status bar frozen in place, sustained flight, a position that jumps. Every legitimate advantage in PEAK has a cause behind it — an item, a buff, a game event — and the check is simply whether the cause is there. Nothing leaves the game process, and nothing is recorded in a vanilla run.

Cosmetic and quality-of-life mods stay allowed. What gets flagged is an advantage in the run, not the fact that you mod your game; a cheat mod that is installed but unused does nothing. Conspicuous runs are never rejected — they are set aside and looked at by a human. Where a threshold is calculated rather than absolute, your result card says under review, so you know your run is being checked and not lost.

🚧 This is still being built out and calibrated. Thresholds are deliberately generous, because a wrongly rejected honest run is worse than a cheater who is caught one review later — the cost is that some cheated runs get through at first. New rules run in a log-only mode against real runs before they are ever allowed to take a time off a board.

If a leaderboard entry looks impossible to you, report it. Boards may be corrected retroactively while this is in beta — the goal is that the times up there are real, and that matters more than never touching a board again.

Good to know

• Playing without a connection works. Timing, splits, your personal bests, your own ghost and MY RUNS are all local. What needs the server is leaderboards, ELO, other people's ghosts and races.
• The leaderboards live in the main menu — the ELO ladder, today's Daily Cup, the speedrun board, and MY RUNS, your own history. Click a row there to pin that run as your comparison instead of your best time.

• Co-op runs are not verified yet — there is no seed handshake between players, so treat co-op times as unofficial for now.
• Losing connection during a race means you are out. There is no rejoin.

Feedback and bug reports

1. Join the Discord — then 2. open the PEAK RANKED thread

Both links are needed: the second one only opens once you are on the server. The thread is the fastest way to reach me. Useful in a report: what you were doing, which mode you were in, and — if the game is still open — the log at BepInEx/LogOutput.log. Every [RankedPeak] line in there is from this mod, and it usually says what went wrong before you noticed it did.

While this is in beta, a report is worth more than a star rating: the scoring rules and the leaderboards can still be corrected, and they get corrected because someone said something.

Licence

Free to use and to pass on unmodified. The source code is not published. See the licence file included in the download for the details.

PEAK belongs to Landfall. This mod ships no game files and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Landfall.

Bug reports and ideas are very welcome — they are the fastest way to get something fixed while this is still in beta. The Discord channel is linked above.