CiCi's Pioneers Shotgun

A double-barrel shotgun for White Knuckle. First item-addition mod for the game.

Features

• Starts in your inventory at the beginning of every run
• Double-barrel: two shots before you need to reload
• Buckshot: 8 pellets per shot in a tight spread — lethal up close, weaker at range
• Uses flare ammo: pick up flares to reload (one flare = one shell)
• Hand-drawn pixel-art sprites for loaded, recoil, and empty states
• Custom sound effects for fire, dry-fire, reload, break-open, break-close, and pellet impacts
• Leaves pixel hit marks on walls so you can see where your pellets landed
• Corner-friendly pellets: shots can reach targets masked by nearby geometry

How to use

The shotgun spawns in the player's inventory at the start of every run along with a pair of flares. Fire it like any other item — the usual left/right mouse button depending on which hand is holding it. Empty it, then press the reload button (with a flare in your other hand) to break it open and reload.

What's new in v0.2.0

Fixes

• Fire animation plays cleanly — no more empty-sprite flash on the last shot
• Fixed the "second shot eats the shell without firing" bug
• Added a shot cooldown so rapid-clicking no longer cancels the fire animation
• Pellets no longer self-damage the player in tight spaces or during a double jump.
• Pellets now land on smaller targets reliably (cockroaches, barrels in corners)

New visuals and audio

• Proper hand-drawn sprites replacing the old model-screenshot look. (By me: Li-0 on Discord)
• First-person hand pose matches the shotgun grip (requires a hand cosmetic equipped to render correctly)
• Pellet hits leave a short-lived yellow mark on walls that fades to black
• Full sound pass: custom fire, dry-fire, reload, break-open, break-close, impact

Known issues

• Marionette bug For some reason white hands are bugged and replaced with the marionette variant. For now use any gloved hands. Working gloved hands (Best: "Leather Gloves", Second best: "Work Gloves (Any)", Winter Gloves).

Credits

• CiCi — art, design, sound collection, mod direction
• Model made in Blockbench
• Source available on the Thunderstore page "Source" tab

For other modders

This is the first item-addition mod for White Knuckle. The Thunderstore page's Source tab shows the decompiled code — everything is open for reference.

Planned features for v0.3.0

• Add it to the trinket system
• Possibly add custom shells
• Custom animations
• Custom Grip (With cosmetic support. Vanilla cosmetic hands only)

Changelog

0.4.3

Added

• Hand scanners now have a 10% chance to be a loaded shotgun with two random everyday shells (Buckshot / Slug / Dragon / Blank, rolled per barrel). Another way to find the gun outside of the Sawed-Off trinket pick.

Changed

• Dragon Breath tightened: spread cut in half (8° → 4°) so pellets group tighter.
• Dragon Breath vs Teeth bumped: 4× → 4.5× per-pellet damage when hitting Teeth.

Fixed

• Recycler no longer flings shells around. Shells now carry the RecycleFit tag so the recycler pins them in place (matching how cans behave) instead of bouncing them out of the zone before destroy.
• Recycler refunds are sane now:
  • Recycling a shotgun refunds 28 roaches (full vending price). Was 1.
  • Each shell refunds half its vending cost (Buckshot 1, Slug 2, Blank 3, Dragon 4, Reverse 8).
• Silenced a spammy vanilla NRE from UT_TriggerBase<T>.TickBoundsCheck (called from UT_DamageTrigger.FixedUpdate). Now swallowed via a Harmony finalizer and counted, with a single summary log line per minute instead of one per FixedUpdate.

0.4.2

Added

• Slug now penetrates. Fires through every enemy along its line at full damage, stops on solid walls. Heavy round that earns its name.

Fixed

• Physics Graduate compat. With the shotgun in your bag, taking Physics Graduate (or any perk that grants flare gun / flare ammo / explosive rebars) used to leave shells hanging in a broken state outside the bag. They now land in the bag as proper shells. Flaregun + ammo → random shell, Explosive Rebar → weighted shell pick (mostly buckshot).
• Infestation: barnacle corpses despawn. Mod-spawned barnacles (regular and harpoon) used to leave corpses blocking vents permanently. Their corpses now fade ~4 seconds after death. Vanilla barnacle behaviour outside Infestation is unchanged.

0.4.1

Fixed

• Reload tray getting stuck on screen. Switching the shotgun to the other hand (or otherwise losing the held weapon) while the tray was open left the reload circles floating permanently — they'd survive into climbing and even a new run, only clearing on a full game restart. The tray is now torn down properly when the shotgun leaves your hand.
• Phantom second tray. A leaked tray could make a single shotgun look like it had two reload trays. Same root cause as above.
• Empty-gun sound. An empty shotgun is already in the broken-open pose, so holding/releasing R on it no longer plays an open or close sound. Loaded guns still get the proper open/close clips.

0.4.0

The big one — shell variants, killable Teeth, the Infestation binding, full audio, and a lot of polish.

Added — Shell variants

The shotgun is now five shells in one. Hold R to break the shotgun open and pick the shell type for each barrel from the on-screen tray.

• Buckshot — the standard 8-pellet spread. Lethal up close.
• Slug — single high-damage projectile. Long range, no spread.
• Dragon Breath — fire cone. Ignites everything in front of you on contact, including Teeth (4× damage vs Teeth — the anti-Teeth specialist).
• Blank — knockback shell. No pellet damage; pushes you back hard (and pushes enemies the other way). Mobility tool.
• Two secret shells

Added — Killable Teeth

Teeth has 150 HP and can finally be put down.

• Damage accumulates across shots; shells stack with anything.
• Dragon Breath does 4× damage vs Teeth — it's the intended kill shell.
• As Teeth loses HP his aggression scales up to 1.5× (faster walk, faster charge, more aggressive AI) — wounded-animal intensity.
• A patience indicator at the top of the screen replaces the vanilla HP bar — watch how close you are to the kill.
• On death he visibly retreats (vanilla flee animation) and drops 4 random shells + 1 artifact straight into your inventory. He stays dead for the rest of the run — even through revives.
• Hammer kills still work but at 1/8 damage. Bring the shotgun.

Added — Infestation binding

A separate binding (cost 1, +0.5× score multiplier). Floods every floor with bloodbugs, hoppers, and barnacles regardless of layout. Patrol drones spawn alongside trying to suppress the swarm. Designed to be played with the Sawed-Off — you'll need the shells.

Heads-up: heavy spawn load may cause stutter on lower-end systems. Tradeoff for the chaos.

Added — Audio

Full sound pass. Fire, dry-fire, reload, break-open / break-close, pellet impact — all wired with their own clips. R-key break-open / close has a 0.5s cooldown so rapid tapping can't spam the audio.

Added — UI

• Ammo HUD at the bottom-right shows what's loaded in each barrel with per-shell color-coded letters (B/S/D/Bl/Rv).
• Reload tray opens while R is held; click a slot to pick the shell going into that barrel.
• "Hold R to change ammo type" hint above the HUD whenever a shotgun is in hand.
• Icons wired for the Infestation binding so it shows properly in the picker.

Fixed

• MoreFOV compat: shotgun held visual now respects MoreFOV's camera changes.

0.3.1

• Shotgun model refreshed to better match the held-gun art and re-scaled to match other in-game items.
• Shell texture refreshed and re-scaled.
• Shells drop from bloodbug + barnacle kills (50% chance, 1–3 shells, 2 most common).