What the mods do

Ungodly Beautify + Sun Flares

Version 1.0.0. Folder Mods\UngodlySciroccoBeautifyFlares. 79 settings, 14 presets.

Puts the two Fab post-process assets Beautify and Sun Flares into Scirocco Thugs. Both materials were read straight from their .uasset files (every shader line, connection, default value, slider range and preset) and ported 1:1, with a full in-game settings menu on F6.

Beautify

• Sharpen: the asset's luma sharpen. It's depth-aware by default, reading the game's depth buffer so it skips object outlines and the sky.
• Colour tweaks: vibrance (smart saturation), contrast, brightness, daltonize (a colour-blindness aid) and hard light.
• Coloured vignette with outer and inner ring, shape, tint, blink and fade.
• Dithering that removes colour banding in skies and fog.
• Compare mode: split screen with the untouched game on one side and Beautify on the other.

Sun Flares

• A glowing sun disk, two sets of corona rays, four lens ghosts (round, hexagon, octagon or pentagon), a rainbow halo and animated diffraction streaks drawn from the asset's own flareNoise texture.
• Flares fade when something covers the sun. The fade reads the game's depth buffer, exactly like the asset, with physics traces as a fallback.
• 14 presets, all taken from the asset: the 4 material defaults, the 9 material instances (Natural1, Natural2, SciFi1 to SciFi4, RedGiant, Artistic1, SunFlaresDemo) and Beautify's demo instance.
• The sun is the level's directional light marked Atmosphere Sun Light, which is what the asset itself reads. If a level has none, the mod can use the brightest visible directional light instead.

The F6 menu

Hover any control for a plain-English explanation with its range and default. Right-click resets a control, and Ctrl + click on a slider lets you type an exact value. Everything saves to config.ini when you close the menu.

Checked before release

• In a test harness driving a real Direct3D 11 device, the mod's GPU output matched an independent CPU transcription of the original asset code pixel by pixel. 28 of 28 checks passed.
• F5 off really means off: the output is the game's own image, bit for bit. The game's complete Direct3D 11 state is identical after the mod draws.
• Shaders compiled by Microsoft's FXC with 0 errors and 0 warnings, and the DLL only calls functions that exist in the official UE4SS 3.0.1 DLL.

Good to know

• The effects are drawn on the finished frame, so, like ReShade, they also touch the HUD a little.
• Sun Flares originally add light before tone mapping, a step nothing outside the engine can hook. So there are two blend modes: Tone-mapped add (the default, with a soft roll-off close to the in-editor look) and Asset formula (the material's exact maths, brighter, clips to white sooner).
• Two bugs in the original assets each have a fix switch: VignetteNormalView and FixShapeSunBehind.
• Cost: two full-screen passes per frame. The Sun Flares pass is skipped entirely whenever you're not facing the sun.

UngodlySciroccoThugs: hit detection + input buffering

Version 1.0.1. Folder Mods\UngodlySciroccoThugs. 35 settings.

The game silently throws away buttons you press during animation locks. It even sets its own isBufferingMelee flag when you attack mid-throw, but nothing in the game ever reads it. This mod fixes that for real, and makes melee hits count along the whole swing.

Input buffering: your presses stop getting eaten

Rules the game uses on purpose are never bypassed: dead, on a ladder, kick fatigue, one air-kick per jump, no heavy attack in the air or while flailing, and the game's "hold Attack for heavy" setting. Taps stay taps: if you already let go, the replay is a full press and release, exactly like your input. Each action has its own buffer window, 150 to 300 ms by default.

Melee hit detection: a DidItHit-style swing sweep

Vanilla checks your melee hitbox on one frozen frame. The mod re-checks the same hitbox along the whole arc your view travelled during the swing, using virtual sockets from root to tip, sub-stepped by angle and distance. It covers weapon melee, super melee and kicks. Extra hits go through the game's own damage code, one hit per enemy per swing, and the sweep only switches on after the mod proves, live, that the hitbox is locked to your camera or body.

Enemy fairness and firearms

• No more hits through walls: thugs and bosses can't melee you through walls or around corners. A hit needs a clear line from the attacker to you.
• Bullet thickness: hitscan shots get a small real radius (5 cm by default) on the game's own bullet channel, so shots that visibly connect can't slip through hitbox gaps. Never through walls.

Ready for the game's update

The game's October update renumbered every button event in the player Blueprint and added a Heavy Attack button (AltFire on right mouse or RB; Throw moved to F). Version 1.0.1 reads the button bindings from the Blueprint's own binding record, the same way the engine does, so renumbering can't break it again. It works on the current update and on the original release.

Checked before release

• 104 of 104 audit checks pass, re-derived from the files of both game builds.
• The maths self-test covered 10,000 random rotations against Unreal's own rotation formulas with 0 failures.
• F8 prints live stats (buffer saves, extra hits, wall blocks) so you can watch it work.

Not covered in this version

• Dash / special move: its cooldown lives in a hidden node the mod can't read.
• Previous and next weapon.
• The Sawn-Off, Revolver and Big Rifle use their own custom traces. Shots through the shared weapon code do get bullet thickness.

UngodlySciroccoNeuralNav: neural tactics + pathfinding

Version 1.0.1. Folder Mods\UngodlySciroccoNeuralNav. 62 settings.

In vanilla, every thug coming for you follows the engine's shortest line, and it's the same line for all of them, so they arrive as a conga line. This mod reshapes their routes and lets a neural network learn how best to come at you.

• Thugs stop walking single-file. Routes are reshaped with the Adaptive Pathfinding System's APS Arc algorithm: they curve out to the left or right, swing wide, or weave. Every curve is stitched together from the game's own path-finder and every shortcut is line-of-sight checked on the navmesh, so nobody walks through walls.
• A neural network picks the approach. The moment a thug starts a move, a network looks at 12 things (how far the trip is, whether you're looking at him, which side his friends are on, his health, whether he holds an attack token, how fast you move, how scared he is…) and picks one of 7 approach styles. For up to 6 seconds it watches what happens, then learns from it.
• The thugs evolve. 8 brains compete and every thug is given one. Every 48 learning episodes the worst half are replaced by children of the best. The population is saved to brain.unnb, so your thugs keep getting smarter across play sessions.
• No more bumping into each other. Unreal's built-in RVO local avoidance is switched on for thugs, and the original values come back exactly if you switch it off.
• A live menu on F9 changes all 62 settings on the fly and shows what the network is thinking for every thug.
• See it yourself: switch on ShowPathOverlay and every thug's route is drawn on screen, coloured by approach style.

The 7 approach styles

Where thugs go is unchanged. Surround and flank spots are still chosen by the game's own behaviour trees, so every fight plays as designed. The mod changes how they get there, and learns which way of getting there works against you.

The F9 menu

Safety first

The route swap only happens on navmeshes that match a verified fingerprint, and no route is changed until three live paths prove the memory layout. Every engine object is tracked through Unreal's own delete notifications, so the mod never touches a freed object. All of its logic runs inside crash guards: a fault switches route reshaping off for the session instead of crashing the game.

Better than the original plugins

Reading the Fab plugins' source turned up three bugs, all fixed in the port and proven by its tests: the network's predictions skipped the biases that training used, training updated a different set of weights than saving and evolving read, and one APS mode could return an unchecked straight line. The port keeps the game's own route instead.

Checked before release

• 34 of 34 self-tests: training matches the plugin's own code, saving and loading are bit-exact, and arcs bend to the requested side and stay walkable.
• 14 of 14 menu tests on a real DirectX 11 runtime, and a 38 of 38 release audit against the official UE4SS 3.0.1 DLL and the game's executable.
• Version 1.0.1 fixes the crash some players saw when quitting the game (LowLevelFatalError [Line: 428]).

Known limits

• Movement only: the game's own AI still decides where thugs stand.
• Navmesh walkers only. Thugs that don't use navmesh paths, such as jetpack flight, aren't reshaped.
• Blocked (partial) paths and requests from background threads keep the engine's route.
• APS's Low-Level Tiles modes and crowd code need engine source and can't be built into a UE4SS mod. The APS Arc mode, the plugin's default, is ported in full.