SpongePEAKOptimized

Fixes and performance work for PEAK, bundled into one mod with a toggle for every feature.

Instead of installing eight single-purpose mods that each patch the game separately, this is one plugin where overlapping behaviour is resolved once and deliberately.

Features

Every feature has its own setting in BepInEx/config/com.sponge.peakoptimized.cfg, so if one misbehaves you can switch off just that one.

Disconnected players

The headline feature. Normally a player who drops has their character deleted instantly, so you cannot help them.

With this installed by the host, a disconnected player's character stays in the world: afflictions keep ticking, hazards still affect them, and teammates can pick them up and carry them to safety even though they are not incapacitated. When they rejoin they take their character back. If they die while away they become a normal ghost, and ghosts cannot be carried.

Two things worth knowing:

• The host decides. Room settings come from whoever creates the lobby, so if the host has this mod, every player sees the behaviour, mod or not. If the host does not, it is inactive regardless of what clients have installed.
• An absent player holds a slot until the timeout expires (default 5 minutes, configurable). That is the cost of keeping their character alive.

Compatibility

This mod covers the same ground as several existing mods. Running both means two mods acting on the same thing, so disable these if you have them:

How this was determined: by comparing the game methods and Photon RPCs each mod touches against the ones this mod patches, using the installed binaries. The first three are direct patch collisions on identical methods. The rest are behavioural: different mechanism, same effect on the same game state.

The worst pairing is LateJoinFix + Reconnect_Catchup, which conflict with each other even without this mod: both warp a joining player, so two warps race for the same character. Resolving that is a large part of why this bundle exists. Here a single arbiter classifies each join once and dispatches to exactly one handler.

Not tested running side by side with these mods in a live session; the overlap above is from binary and behavioural comparison, which is why the guidance is to disable rather than to expect a specific failure.

A note on LobbyJoinFix

Investigated and deliberately not implemented. PEAK's own GameBooter now defers a pending invite until ConnectedAndReady:

if (!NetCode.Session.IsConnectedAndReady)
    NetCode.ConnectionEvents.ConnectedAndReady += JoinLobbyAfterRelayReady;
else if (NetCode.Matchmaking.HasPendingInvite)
    NetCode.Matchmaking.ConsumePendingJoin(andJoin: true);

That is the same defer-and-replay the mod added, so reimplementing it would race the game's own logic. IceMods-PeakLobbyJoinFix also targets SteamLobbyHandler.OnLobbyJoinRequested, which has since moved to Peak.Network.SteamLobbyAPI.

Prior art

Independent implementation, written against PEAK's own assemblies. The problems it solves were identified by earlier mods listed above, and this bundle exists because those solutions overlapped and sometimes fought each other.

Differences worth noting:

• One arbiter decides how a joining player is handled, so late-join, position-restore and catch-up cannot race.
• Per-feature toggles with failure isolation: a feature whose patches fail to bind is reported by name rather than silently counted as working.
• SoftDependencyFix is an IL transpiler over a single Assembly.GetTypes() call, recovering the types that did load instead of discarding the whole assembly.
• Disconnected-player persistence, carrying disconnected teammates, rejoin position restore and the mod handshake have no upstream equivalent.

Adaptive networking

If one player is on a weak connection, everyone feels it as rubber-banding and characters running in place. This measures each player's connection and adapts the room to suit the weakest one.

• No extra traffic. It reads latency, jitter, packet loss and send-backlog counters that Photon already maintains. It does not send ping packets, which would burden exactly the connections that can least afford them.
• Jitter matters more than ping. A steady 250ms connection plays fine; a 90ms one that spikes to 400ms is what actually causes rubber-banding, and that is what this reacts to.
• The host decides one rate and everyone matches it, because the game interpolates other players against the local send rate. A client changing its own rate would cause the very stutter this removes.
• Nothing happens if nobody is struggling, and players without the mod are never counted as bad, so they cannot drag the room down.
• Everyone in the lobby needs the mod for the rate to change. The game interpolates other players against the local send rate, so a vanilla player left at 30Hz while the room sends slower would stutter. If anyone lacks it, the room stays at vanilla 30Hz.

Works for satellite, Starlink, tethered mobile, congested Wi-Fi and long-haul connections.

Turn on Telemetry (F6) to see your own latency and jitter, the room's current send rate, and each player's connection quality, so you can tell whose link is actually struggling.

Proton and Linux

PEAK is a Windows build, so under Proton it reports itself as Windows and ordinary platform checks cannot tell the difference. This mod detects the real situation (via the wine_get_version marker that Wine exports and Windows does not) and applies the few settings that genuinely differ:

• Background loading priority is raised under Proton only, so more DXVK shader-pipeline compilation happens during loading screens instead of stuttering during play.
• Everything else is unchanged, because the rest of the optimizations remove work from hot paths, which helps identically on every platform.

On native Windows this does nothing unless you configure it. The detected platform is written to the log, which is worth including in any performance report.

Requirements

BepInEx, SpongePEAKCore and SpongePEAKLib. r2modman installs these automatically.

Performance features absorbed from PeakOptimizer

Conflicts with reis637-PeakOptimizer. Both patch the same methods. Run one or the other. Its experimental GPU occlusion culler is not reimplemented here: it is disabled by default even in that mod, and marked use-at-your-own-risk. Run PeakOptimizer if you specifically want it.

License

Free to use, stream, and include in modpacks. No attribution needed for any of that.

Attribution is only required if you decompile it and reuse the code. Please do not reupload it elsewhere or sell it.

Full terms in LICENSE.

Keybinds

All rebindable, in the config file or in Settings > Mods.

Configuration

Every setting is in BepInEx/config/com.sponge.peakoptimized.cfg, or in the game's own Settings > Mods tab.

AudioFix

Diagnostics

Fixes

Network

Performance

Rejoin

Visuals