TightBeam - A Proper Flashlight for Schedule I

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A proper flashlight. It upgrades the game's own flashlight - toggle it with your flashlight key, then hold ALT + mouse wheel to dial the beam from a wide near-flood to a tight, far-reaching throw. No map-wide floodlight, no blinding glare - just a light that feels like a flashlight.

Features

• A beam you can aim and shape. Hold ALT + mouse wheel to slide a single Focus axis: wide end = a short, broad flood; narrow end = a tight cone that throws far. Range and cone angle both follow it.
• Velocity-sensitive focus. Scroll slowly for fine steps; flick fast and the beam races to the nearest extreme, easing in smoothly instead of popping.
• Fixed, sane brightness. Held within a hard floor and ceiling, so nothing blinds the screen. Brightness is not a player control; mods can drive it via the API for effects.
• Shadows and a cool-white tint by default, both configurable, so the beam is blocked by walls and reads against the game's warm lighting.
• In perfect sync with the game. It drives off the game's own flashlight state, so on/off never falls out of step - your flashlight key toggles it, and it swaps the vanilla point light for its own clean cone.
• Light-touch and update-resilient. A spotlight that follows your camera - no gameplay rewired, no networking touched; a tiny guard keeps ALT+scroll from cycling your hotbar.
• Cross-mod API. Other mods can drive the beam (dim, flicker, blink, override) through a drop-in shim that is a safe no-op when TightBeam is absent.

Controls

• Flashlight key (your game bind) - toggle on/off
• ALT + mouse wheel - focus (wide near-flood to tight far-throw)

On/off uses your game's own flashlight key; the focus modifier is rebindable in the config.

Requirements

• Schedule I (IL2CPP) with MelonLoader 0.7.3+. No other dependencies.

Settings

Enabled, FocusModifierKey (LeftAlt), DefaultFocus (0.5), DefaultIntensity (7), MinIntensity/MaxIntensity (1/20), RangeWide/RangeNarrow (8/34), AngleWide/AngleNarrow (66/16), ColorHex (#E6F2FF), CastShadows, plus fine focus-feel tuning. In UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg under [TightBeam].

License

MIT. See the included LICENSE.md.

Changelog

All notable changes to TightBeam are documented here. This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[2.1.1] - 2026-08-04

Fixed

• TightBeam costs almost nothing while your flashlight is off. It was recomposing the beam and carrying the light around behind the camera on every frame, for a light nobody could see.

[2.1.0] - 2026-08-01

Fixed

• Works on Schedule I 0.4.6f11. Stay on 2.0.0 if you are still playing 0.4.5f2.

[2.0.0] - 2026-07-26

Co-op.

Added

• Other players' flashlights are TightBeam cones too. Aimed where they are actually looking, pitch included, instead of the small vanilla point light. Their own focus, brightness and colour come across live, so a beam looks the same from every seat.
• Late joiners see the lights that are already on. The base game never tells a joining player about a flashlight that was switched on before they arrived; TightBeam carries that state itself.
• Players without the mod still get a cone, drawn from your own default settings. Turn that off with RemoteBeamsForUnmoddedPlayers if you would rather see their vanilla light.
• Blink, flicker and pulse carry across, so a mod that dims or flickers your beam now reads correctly to everyone else instead of only to you.
• Performance controls for a full lobby: MaxRemoteBeams (default 4), RemoteBeamMaxDistance, frustum culling, and RemoteShadowNearest (default 0 - only your own beam casts shadows). Sized for lobbies well past the stock four players, since other mods raise that cap a long way.
• Sharing rides a part of the Steam lobby the game itself never reads or writes, so a player without TightBeam has nothing running on their machine because of you. Needs a Steam lobby: on a direct connect or a dedicated server you still get correctly aimed cones, just with your own default settings.
• Modder API v2: read the other players' beams - who has one, its shape and colour, where it starts and which way it points. Deliberately read-only: every player owns their own beam, so you drive the local one as before and it replicates by itself.

Changed

• The transient effects now run from one shared implementation, so a flicker you see on someone else's beam has the same strength and rate as the one they see. It runs from each machine's own clock, so the noise is offset in phase rather than sample-for-sample identical - which is not something an eye can pick up on a flickering light.

Notes

• Existing mods built against the v1 API keep working unchanged; the API only gained members.
• Single-player behaviour is unchanged - nothing is sent and no extra work runs.

[1.0.0] - 2026-07-02

Initial release.

Added

• A proper, limited-range handheld flashlight: one spotlight that follows the camera with a small hand-held offset and survives scene loads.
• Focus control on ALT + mouse wheel - a single axis from a wide near-flood to a tight far-throw, driving both range and cone angle. Velocity-sensitive: slow scrolling makes fine steps, a fast flick races the beam to the nearest extreme, and the displayed beam eases in smoothly.
• On/off follows the game's own flashlight (your flashlight key) as the single source of truth, so the beam is always in sync and can never drift; TightBeam dims the vanilla point light and shows its own cone.
• Brightness stays within a hard floor and ceiling and is driven by mods via the API - no player brightness keys.
• Soft shadows and a cool-white default tint, both configurable, plus configurable range/angle endpoints, colour, start-on and full key rebinding (MelonPreferences under [TightBeam]).
• Cross-mod control API (TightBeam.Api / the Beam shim): on/off, intensity, range, colour, Blink/Flicker/Pulse, fire-and-forget temporary overrides and a scoped per-field override stack. A safe no-op when TightBeam is absent, so consumer mods need no hard dependency.
• Keeps the game's own equipped-flashlight and phone lamp in sync when a mod override holds the beam dark, so blackout effects read correctly.
• Hotbar ALT+scroll guard so adjusting focus never cycles your hotbar slot.