Rope Physics Rewrite

I ended up rewriting most of White Knuckle's rope movement because the original ropes could feel awkward and unpredictable.

Swinging now carries your momentum properly, climbing behaves more like the normal handholds, and releasing a rope should not launch you across the map. Ropes can be carried while slack, wrap around corners, collide with the environment, and settle on floors and ledges.

How It Works

• Hold sprint while using a rope to enter swing mode.
• Walk without sprinting to enter climb mode, including at high angles.
• Move forward and backward while swinging to pump gradually.
• Grab anywhere on the rope without losing your incoming momentum.
• Hold two ropes at the same time.
• Walk with a loose rope while standing on the ground.
• Jump while holding a rope to loosen it until tension returns.
• Grab a solid ledge while holding a rope to climb normally while the rope follows behind you.

The rewrite also cleans up hand jitter, extreme release speed, repeated rope boosting, unstable loose ends, wall clipping, and erratic corner deflections.

Important

Leaderboard submissions are disabled while this plugin is installed.

Do not combine this with another mod that replaces rope movement or rope physics.

Installation

Mod Manager

Install with r2modman, Gale, or the Thunderstore Mod Manager and launch the game through your selected profile.

Manual

1. Install BepInEx 5 for White Knuckle.
2. Place WhiteKnuckleRopeRewrite.dll in BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Restart the game.

Configuration

The first launch creates:

BepInEx/config/com.wk.ropephysicsrewrite.cfg

Available settings:

• Enabled
• PumpPower
• Gravity
• Damping

There is no menu or hotkey.

Source and Issues

Source code and issue tracking are available on GitHub.

Changelog

1.1.42

• Removed the artificial behind-the-player swing grip offset.
• Swinging now displays the rope at its naturally solved position, with reach correction only when needed.

1.1.41

• Prevented rope corrections from bypassing the player's collision controller or moving the player an unsafe distance.
• Repaired invalid rope geometry before it could propagate into player movement.
• Fixed contacted rope nodes being pulled back through walls during constraint solving.
• Hardened grab, release, jump, scene, configuration, and endpoint cleanup against partial failures.
• Removed recurring swing, climb, hand, and rendering allocations that could cause delayed stutter.
• Returned long-running released ropes to native physics instead of freezing them in motion.

1.1.40

• Fixed rope teardown leaving the player in a no-collision state.
• Restored rope, hand, and endpoint state on release, destruction, scene changes, and solver errors.
• Removed stale rope and player state before it could accumulate across multiple grabs.
• Bounded released-rope collision work and reduced sleeping-rope checks.
• Reduced collision-query cost in maps with many ropes.

1.1.39

• Restored the rope's natural grip position during swinging.
• The held point is now adjusted only when it exceeds normal arm reach.
• The held rope trails slightly behind the player's swing direction.

1.1.38

• Pulled the swing-mode rope grip much closer to the player's body.

1.1.37

• Locked the held section of a taut rope in front of the player during swing mode.
• Kept the visual rope, loose tail, and hand grip aligned without adding force to the swing.

1.1.36

• Fixed valid rope grips dropping when the swing briefly moved the grip point beyond the game's original hand reach check.
• Kept normal manual and stamina-based rope releases unchanged.

1.1.35

• Fixed released ropes continuing expensive collision work for the rest of a run.
• Released ropes now sleep after settling and wake when grabbed, struck, or moved.
• Repaired player controller collision detection during rope use and release.

1.1.34

• Initial Thunderstore release.
• Replaced rope movement with momentum-based pendulum swinging.
• Added separate swing and climb behavior based on sprint state.
• Added slack rope carrying, rope-held jumping, and two-rope support.
• Added wall, floor, corner, and ledge collision handling.
• Added stable environment wrapping and changing collision pivots.
• Improved momentum transfer when grabbing, releasing, and jumping.
• Improved hand, loose-tail, endpoint, and rope rendering stability.
• Prevented extreme releases, repeated rope boosting, and stacked jumps.
• Disabled leaderboard submissions while the plugin is installed.