Star Pointer

Super Mario Galaxy's Co-op experience brought to Risk of Rain. Only playable in Multiplayer.

Watch a teammate with a free star cursor and help by holding enemies, shooting Star Bits, activating shrines and healing allies.

Controls

Skill controls follow your RoR2 bindings. Mouse and keyboard are required.

Star Bits

Enemies killed by anyone drop colorful Star Bits. Hover over them to collect $1 each before they disappear after 30 seconds.

Shooting costs $1 for a burst of two Star Bits that gently home toward enemies. When you're out of money, you fire single gray Star Bits for quarter damage. Shots use the watched teammate's stats and on-hit item effects. Fired Star Bits cannot be collected.

Helping your team

Hold Primary over an enemy to root it, or use it to activate chests, shrines and other interactables you can afford, including Shrines of the Mountain and Newt Altars. Interactions that cost health, items or equipment are unavailable.

Shake the cursor back and forth over an ally for half a second to begin healing 1% of their maximum HP per second. Keep shaking to continue; brief slips off the ally are forgiven. Healing has a visual and sound effect.

Star Pointer has no HP and cannot collect items. It does not count toward teleporter charging and dies when all normal player teammates are dead. Other Star Pointers cannot keep the run alive.

The camera can move through terrain, with localized transparency to help you see your teammate and enemies while clipped inside it. Walls still block shots and interactions.

Skins

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

Installation

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

For manual installation, install the dependencies listed in manifest.json and copy plugins/StarPointer into BepInEx/plugins. The package includes PassivePlayers.dll; install only one copy.

Settings appear in BepInEx/config/local.starpointer.survivor.cfg after first launch.

Known limitations

This is an early release; multiplayer and terrain rendering still need broader in-game testing. Some bosses can ignore roots, and unusual modded interactables may not work.

For mod developers

The included Passive Players API lets other spectator-style survivors share the team-wipe behavior. See PASSIVE_PLAYER_API.md for details.

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.