I Am Item

You died. Instead of just watching, press V and the game throws you into a random valuable somewhere on the level. A mug, a toilet, a grand piano. For a while you are that thing: roll, jump, rattle, block a doorway, and slam into a monster hard enough to hurt it.

You do not pick the item. That is the whole game. Sometimes you land in a vase next to the friend being chased. Sometimes you land in a statue in an empty corridor. Possession is a lottery, not a precision tool.

While you are dead, three real valuables from this level spin above the spectate head, and the prompt counts your bar up to the moment you can jump in.

The item does not lose money

While a ghost is inside, the valuable loses no value at all - not from falls, not from tumbles, not from being knocked off a shelf. Landing in a 20,000 crystal ball should not tax the team for the crime of moving.

That holds while you ram, too. Speed is the weapon and there is no key for it: get moving fast enough and whatever you hit takes the damage instead of you. The risk is everything around the hit - where you end up afterwards, the teammate you flatten, the other valuable you shatter on the way through.

Deadly pits, lava and crushers are the exception. There the shield does not help: the item dies, you get ejected, and your bar is wiped.

Controls

Team convention, not enforced by the mod: one knock means yes or run, two knocks mean no or monster behind you.

The stability bar

The mod does not add a second resource for getting in. It uses the same energy the game already spends on rolling your severed head around, so a dead player has one tank for everything: help the team through an item, or push your head to the truck and get revived. The Death Head Battery upgrade makes both longer.

Inside the item you have your own stamina. A full bar is about 90 seconds of doing nothing, and roughly ten jumps if you spend it on jumping. Slamming into a wall costs a little, but scraping along the floor while rolling is free. Ramming costs nothing extra - the speed you already paid for is the attack.

Item classes

Heavy items are not about mobility. They are about noise, about parking yourself in a doorway, and about hitting very hard when you do get moving.

Everyone in the lobby needs the mod

The sad line a living player says when they pick you up has to be sent by that player's own client - the game validates the sender. Without the mod on their side there is no phrase. Everything else still works.

Configuration

Every number lives in BepInEx/config/sweet.iamitem.cfg and can be edited in a text editor. Notable switches:

• RamEnabled = false - a possessed item hurts nothing, ever.
• RamHurtsPlayers, RamTumblesPlayers - whether a fast item can flatten a living teammate.
• RamDamage, RamMinSpeed, RamFullSpeed - how hard and how fast.
• PossessKey - rebind possession away from V.
• SadPhrasesEnabled, CartPhrasesEnabled, BreakPhrasesEnabled - voice lines.
• PreviewEnabled, PreviewCount - the spinning models above the head.
• GlowEnabled - the fresnel glow on a possessed item.

Building

Copy src/Local.props.example to src/Local.props and fill in your own paths: the REPO_Data\Managed folder of the installed game, and your Thunderstore profile name. That file stays out of git.

python src/pack.py

Runs the balance checks, builds the DLL, verifies the version matches in three places, packs the Thunderstore archive and drops the files into your profile.

Build the DLL only:

cd src && dotnet build -c Release

Run the balance checks only:

cd tests && dotnet run -c Release

How it works

Half the mechanic already exists in the game, and the mod leans on it instead of shipping its own:

• head energy and the charged spectate jump (SpectateCamera, PlayerDeathHead);
• the money shield: the public destroyDisable flag, no patch needed;
• forced voice lines (ChatManager.PossessChat);
• the glow uses the stock _FresnelColor / _FresnelPower shader properties the game already uses to light up mimics.

No custom models, textures, shaders or sounds. Some of the fields the mod needs are internal, so BepInEx.AssemblyPublicizer.MSBuild publicises a copy of the assembly in obj; the game's own files are never touched.

MIT.

Changelog

1.0.1

• Every numeric setting now has a minimum and a maximum. In-game config menus draw them as sliders, and without limits those sliders ran into negative values that no setting was ever meant to hold.
• The possess key is picked from a list of key names instead of being a number on a slider. Editing the .cfg by hand still accepts any KeyCode name; an unknown one falls back to V.
• Breaking a possessed item is noticed again. The mod waited for the item to disappear from the level, which the game does not do straight away, so the possession never ended as "destroyed": no farewell line from whoever broke it, and no stamina penalty for losing the body. The break itself is caught now.
• The farewell line finds its speaker. The last pair of hands is remembered while the item is still whole, and it is read from the grabbing list the game keeps in sync for everyone, not from a field only the grabber fills in.

1.0.0

First release.

• Press V while dead and spectating to possess a random valuable on the level. You do not choose the item. It could be a mug next to the friend being chased, or a statue in an empty corridor.
• WASD rolls the item along the floor, Space charges a jump, LMB rattles to pull monsters, E leaves the item.
• Speed is the weapon. There is no attack key: a fast enough item damages monsters, flattens living teammates and shatters other loot on the way through.
• The possessed item never loses money, no matter how hard you throw it around. Deadly pits, lava and crushers are the exception - there it dies and your bar is wiped.
• Everything runs on one bar shared with the vanilla severed head, so a dead player has a single tank: haunt through an item, or push your head to the truck and get revived. The Death Head Battery upgrade makes both longer.
• While a living player carries the possessed item, they say something sad about it. Everyone in the lobby needs the mod for those lines to be heard.
• Spinning previews of real valuables from the level float above the spectate head, so a dead player can see the mod exists before the bar is full.
• Every number is in BepInEx/config/sweet.iamitem.cfg.