🧛 BetterCards — Vampire Crawlers mod

A BepInEx mod for Vampire Crawlers that enhances the card UI with useful information at a glance.

Features

✨ Level-up card selection — badges

• 🥇 EVO (animated chromatic medallion, top-right) — appears on a card when picking it would complete an evolution combo your deck doesn't yet have. The rainbow ring rotates and a light streak sweeps across it for a holographic foil effect.
• 🥈 EVO bis (smaller silver medallion with a green ✓, top-right) — appears when the offered card would complete a combo, but the combo is already covered by your current deck. Picking is redundant for that combo (still useful info if you want a duplicate, evolved tier, etc.).
• 🌈 NEW (rainbow pill, top-left) — appears when you own zero copies of that card
• 🔢 ×N (gold pill, top-left) — shows how many copies of that card you already own

No more guessing whether a card completes a combo or whether you've seen it before.

📊 Deck viewer — COMPOSITION panel

When you open the draw pile or discard pile modal during combat, a COMPOSITION panel appears showing the mana cost distribution of your full deck (draw pile + hand + discard pile combined).

Each mana cost is shown as a colored orb with a count badge. The panel adapts to your deck size:

• Small deck (≤10 cards visible) — panel appears horizontally below the card list
• Large deck (11+ cards) — panel moves to the right side of the modal as a vertical list

Companion cards are excluded from the count. The panel refreshes automatically when you evolve cards at altars or pick up wild cards.

🔒 Card Lock

Right-click any card (in combat hand, draw pile, or discard pile) to lock it. A golden padlock replaces the mana cost orb, and the game treats the card as unaffordable: clicking, dragging, pressing space/enter, or any other play attempt produces the natural "can't afford" shake + sound feedback instead of playing the card.

• 🎯 Why it exists — for cards with Destruction (one-shot consumed on play): you typically want to keep them in hand until you're ready (combo, fusion altar, etc.). Locking prevents accidental plays while you cycle through your other cards.
• 🖱️ How to lock — right-click the card, press . / Suppr on the numeric keypad, or press Select/Back on a controller while hovering it.
• ⏭️ Auto-skip — when every card in hand is locked or unaffordable, the turn auto-ends if you have the game's "End turn automatically" option enabled.
• 💾 Persistence — locks survive game restarts (stored per-card via stable GUID in BepInEx/config/BetterCards.locks.txt).
• 📚 Modal — the same padlock appears on locked cards in the draw pile / discard pile modal. Right-click in the modal toggles the lock for that specific card. Two copies of the same card are tracked independently.

The whole feature can be disabled in BepInEx/config/com.tovak.vc.bettercards.cfg if you ever want to.

🌍 Multilingual support

The COMPOSITION panel is translated into all 12 languages the game ships with: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Switch language mid-session and the panel rebuilds instantly.

Screenshots

EVO and NEW badges

EVO bis badge (combo already covered by deck)

×N badge (owned card count)

COMPOSITION panel — horizontal (small deck)

COMPOSITION panel — vertical (large deck)

Card Lock — locked card in combat hand

Requirements

• BepInEx 6.0.0-be.755 (IL2CPP) or later

Vampire Crawlers is an IL2CPP game. Make sure you use the CoreCLR / IL2CPP build of BepInEx 6, not the Mono one, otherwise the mod will not load.

Installation

Steam:

1. Install BepInEx 6 (IL2CPP) in your Vampire Crawlers folder
2. Drop BetterCards.dll into Vampire Crawlers/BepInEx/plugins/
3. Launch the game

Game Pass: same steps, but BepInEx goes into Vampire Crawlers/Content/ (where the .exe is).

Author

TovaK

If you enjoy the mod, you can support me on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/tovak66

Source code: github.com/TovaK66/BetterCards

License

Free to use and redistribute. Credit appreciated.

Changelog

v1.3.5

Fixes

• After unlocking a card, BetterCards now asks the game to refresh the native cost/combo display for cards in hand.
• This should let cards regain their current combo value immediately after being unlocked, instead of keeping stale cost text until the game refreshes it naturally.

v1.3.4

Fixes

• Fixed a Card Lock bug where evolving a locked card could transfer the lock to another card.
• Locked cards now have their lock cleared when the evolution succeeds.
• Added lock integrity cleanup after evolution so stale or remapped card GUIDs cannot keep a lock on the wrong card.

v1.3.3

Compatibility

• Updated BetterCards for Vampire Crawlers 1.5.
• Removed BetterCards' old COMPOSITION panel because the game now includes its own native deck composition / mana breakdown UI.

Fixes

• Fixed startup console spam caused by the game removing CardSelectionCardView._isHovered in v1.5.
• Fixed incorrect EVO badges appearing on non-evolving item cards such as Bone.
• Kept Card Lock working with the updated deck / draw-discard modal flow.

v1.3.2

New

• Controller shortcut for Card Lock — hover/select a card and press Select/Back on a controller to lock or unlock it. Right-click and numpad . / Del still work.

v1.3.1

Fixes

• EVO badge now detects 3-component evolutions (e.g. Phieraggi recipe: Phiera Der Tuphello + Eight The Sparrow + Tirajisú). The game's recipe description uses an internal name ("Tirimasu") that doesn't match the actual card asset name ("Tirajisú"), so the previous exact-text matcher failed and the EVO badge never appeared on the third component. CheckCombo now tolerates such "orphan" component names by mapping them to an unused deck card that doesn't conflict with another comp and isn't independently referenced as a comp by any other recipe. Reported by shinjidf on NexusMods.

v1.3.0

New

• Card Lock — right-click any card (in combat hand, draw pile, or discard pile) to lock it. A golden padlock replaces the mana cost orb and the game treats the card as unaffordable, so any play attempt (mouse click, drag, space/enter) triggers the natural "can't afford" shake + sound feedback instead of playing it.
  • Designed primarily for Destruction cards (one-shot consumed on play) when you want to keep them in hand until a combo / fusion altar opportunity arises.
  • Alternative shortcut: . / Suppr on the numeric keypad while hovering a card.
  • Auto-skip — if every card in hand is locked or unaffordable, the turn auto-ends (when the game's "End turn automatically" setting is on).
  • Persistence — locks survive game restarts via BepInEx/config/BetterCards.locks.txt (stored per-card GUID, stable across sessions).
  • Modal visualisation — the padlock also appears on cards in the draw pile / discard pile modal. Right-click toggles the lock there too. Two copies of the same card are tracked independently (per-instance via stable rank mapping).
  • WILD cards — the cost text TMP is hidden permanently on Wild cards because the orb sprite already shows the W graphically (was rendering W twice).
• Custom procedural lock badge (golden ring + padlock pixel-art sprite, fade-in zoom animation) and three short SFX (lock / unlock / blocked) bundled inside the DLL as embedded resources — no extra files to drop next to the plugin.
• Toggle to disable the whole feature: CardLock.Enabled in BepInEx/config/com.tovak.vc.bettercards.cfg.

v1.2.2

New

• X bucket in the COMPOSITION panel for cards whose cost is variable (X Mana gem). Rendered as a normal orb labelled "X", placed right after the Wild bucket and before the numeric costs.

Fixes

• Cost-text parsing is now strict: only 0..9, W/U, and X are recognised. The previous "any non-numeric text → WILD" rule wrongly bucketed X Mana cards and certain draw-pile placeholders as wild, producing things like "W x6" for a deck with zero wild cards. Other texts now fall through to the numeric fallbacks (GetCardCostTypeManaCost → cfg.manaCost).

v1.2.1

Fixes

• COMPOSITION panel rendered with white squares (no orb sprites) and no gold frame when the draw pile modal was opened with the deck still fully in hand. Orb sprites are now also pulled from hand CardViews during the _allCards iteration, and the gold frame is read directly from the DeckBox modal's own [frame] GameObject (always present in the modal prefab) instead of being derived from a card.

v1.2.0

New

• EVO badge redesign — the gold medallion is replaced by an animated chromatic ring that cycles HSV hues around the circle, with a light streak sweeping across it for a holographic foil effect. The "EVO" text stays anchored at the centre.
• EVO bis — a new smaller silver medallion with a green ✓ in the corner, shown when the offered card would complete a combo but every component is already in your deck. Picking is redundant for that combo; the bis surfaces the information without competing with the primary rainbow EVO.

Fixes

• ownedConfigs now includes cards currently being offered, so the redundancy check correctly detects duplicates (e.g. Magic Wand offered while you already own Magic Wand + Tome).
• Removed a legacy guard that suppressed EVO checks on cards you already owned, which prevented the bis from triggering on duplicate offers.

v1.1.2

Fixes

• Wild orb sprite is now cached even when the only Wild in your deck lives in the hand or in a pile that is not currently visible. Previously the COMPOSITION badge fell back to a plain W on a regular orb in that case; the proper layered Wild rendering is now used as soon as any Wild card has a CardView in the scene.

v1.1.1

Fixes

• Fixed a crash in the level-up COMPOSITION overlay when the deck contained a Wild card and the Wild sprite had not been cached yet (i.e. the draw/discard pile had not been opened with a Wild visible). The panel now renders reliably and falls back to a W badge until the Wild sprite is available.

v1.1.0

New features

• COMPOSITION panel — opens with the draw pile or discard pile during combat, showing the mana cost distribution of your full deck (draw + hand + discard combined)
• Adapts layout: horizontal under the cards for small decks (≤10), vertical side panel for larger decks (11+)
• Companion cards are excluded from the count

Localization

• Multilingual support for FR / EN / DE / IT / ES / RU / PL / PT-BR / JA / KO / ZH-Hans / ZH-Hant
• Panel rebuilds in real time when you change the game language

Fixes

• Panel refreshes correctly after altar evolutions and wild card pickups
• Correct mana cost shown for evolved cards (e.g. SantaWater → La Borra)
• Correct deck size in combat (full deck instead of only the visible draw pile)

v1.0.2

• Fix FPS drop — cache FindObjectOfType result

v1.0.1

• Fix badges not refreshing on Caprice reroll

v1.0.0

• Initial release: EVO / NEW / ×N badges on the level-up card selection screen