Star Pointer

A co-op spectator support survivor inspired by Super Mario Galaxy's Player 2. Watch a teammate, move a free star cursor, and help your team with roots, Star Bits and shake healing.

Controls

Skill controls follow your RoR2 bindings. WASD camera movement and the scroll wheel require mouse and keyboard. Zoom is limited to 2–40 meters and respects stage geometry. Utility resets the view to the teammate's camera.

A helping star

Enemies killed by anyone drop three collectible Star Bits by default. Bits use Sale Star's model at half its item scale, spin on every axis and receive a random red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet color. Fired bits spin four times faster. Free shots are gray and deal one quarter of paid-round damage. Fired bits cannot be collected.

Your attacks use the watched player's damage, attack speed, critical chance and native on-hit effects. Their items stay in their inventory. Normal shared kill money still applies; Star Bits add $1 each when collected.

Shake healing allows a generous halo around an ally and 0.35 seconds of missed hover or motion. It requires actual back-and-forth cursor movement; camera movement or tiny jitter does not qualify. Healing produces native healing crosses and a positional healing sound on the affected ally, at most once per second. Healing modifiers apply normally. No added HUD text is displayed.

Star Pointer has no gameplay HP and cannot collect items or pay HP/item/equipment costs. It cannot charge holdout zones. It dies when every connected, non-passive teammate is dead; pending normal revives are respected. Other Star Pointers, drones and disconnected players cannot keep the run alive. All-passive parties lose after the stage's short initialization grace.

Skins

• Player 2: orange star, default.
• Player 1: blue star, alternate in the Appearance tab.

Installation and multiplayer

Install through a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager. All players and the host/dedicated server need the same version and dependencies. Select Star Pointer in character selection.

For manual installation, install the dependencies in manifest.json and copy the plugins/StarPointer folder into BepInEx/plugins. The package includes the shared Passive Players API; install only one copy of PassivePlayers.dll.

Balance and camera settings appear in BepInEx/config/local.starpointer.survivor.cfg after first launch. Defaults: three drops per enemy, 0.2-second burst/gray-shot interval, 100% paid-round damage, 90 degrees/second orbit and 12-meter fallback camera distance.

Compatibility and current limits

This is an early release. The build, gameplay policy tests, installed-game API checks and package format checks pass; live multiplayer coverage and individual item interactions are still pending. Native roots stop movement but do not silence attacks or guarantee cancellation of scripted boss animations. Ordinary purchases and interactables are supported; pickup-choice panels and unusual modded stage interactions need further testing.

The model and healing effects load from the installed game. No extracted game models, textures or audio are distributed in this package.

For mod developers

PassivePlayers.dll provides the shared PassivePlayer marker and body registration API for survivors that should not sustain a wiped team. See PASSIVE_PLAYER_API.md in the package. The API is a separate plugin with GUID local.passiveplayers.api.

0.1.6

• Correct vertical camera movement: holding W raises the camera around the watched player; holding S lowers it.

0.1.5

• Activate terrain fading only when the Pointer camera is inside world collision geometry, using two-sided surface-crossing probes for non-convex meshes instead of camera-to-target casts or a proximity sphere.
• Limit fading to screen windows covering the watched player and living enemies. Draw the remaining terrain at full opacity using its native textures; overlapping windows share one fade layer.
• Remove cursor spin inertia and dead zone. Mouse movement drives 18 degrees of rotation per pixel, with immediate direction reversal and a 10,800-degree/second limit. Cursor size, aiming and healing gesture detection are unchanged.

0.1.4

• Replace terrain shader swapping with a transparent composite of occluders rendered using their original materials, retaining complete triplanar/splat texture layers.
• Increase Star Bit lights to intensity 2 and range 4.5, force pixel lighting and illuminate all layers; enable the nearest 32 per camera to bound cost.
• Fade Star Bits near the Pointer camera using their native dither shader: fully faded at 0.75 meters, fully visible at four meters; preserve other views and restore render properties.
• Change shake-heal warm-up to 0.5 seconds, retaining 1% max HP/second.
• Fix cursor pings by bypassing the native screen-center aim rewrite inside ping generation.
• Shrink the cursor from 64 to 32 pixels, increase spin sensitivity/speed/response, and prevent diagonal movement from canceling spin.

0.1.3

• Increase default orbit speed to 105 degrees/second and smooth acceleration, deceleration and zoom. Reverse W/S again.
• Toggle Align Camera to continuously bind to the watched camera; toggle off to resume independent controls.
• Allow camera clipping; add camera-scoped terrain transparency and ambient occlusion with render-state restoration.
• Increase cursor size, bit collection radius and healing halo; add mouse-driven visual pointer spin.
• Reduce collectible lifetime to 30 seconds and add subtle matching-color lights.
• Spend $1 once for two paid rounds with gentle homing; retain straight quarter-damage gray singles at $0.
• Reduce shake-heal warm-up to 0.1 seconds and increase base healing to 1% maximum HP/second.
• Route middle-mouse pings through the free cursor.
• Exclude Star Pointer from holdout/teleporter in-zone and total player counts.
• Resolve shrine interactions through native entity locators, including Shrines of the Mountain.
• Update the Thunderstore description to the requested Super Mario Galaxy co-op blurb.

0.1.2

• Invert A/D orbit controls, retaining inverted W/S.
• Add scroll-wheel zoom: up moves closer, down moves farther away.
• Add networked healing crosses and positional sound on allies receiving shake healing, throttled to once per second per ally.
• Replace Star Bit sprites with render-only Sale Star models at half item scale.
• Give each bit a synchronized random ROYGBIV color and spin it on all axes; fired bits spin four times faster.
• Render free quarter-damage shots in gray.
• Add a Thunderstore-facing README and validated upload ZIP.

0.1.1

• Remove added HUD text and invert W/S orbit controls.
• Fire three Star Bits for $1 and free gray quarter-damage singles at $0.
• Apply the lunar root effect while holding enemies.
• Add shake healing with a one-second warm-up, 0.5% max HP per second, a forgiving radius and 0.35-second grace.

0.1.0

• Initial Star Pointer survivor, skins, spectator camera, collectibles, remote interactions and shared Passive Players API.