Install the Graphics Mod

Installation

StixUngodlyLUSGraphics_v1_1_0.rar
├── StixUngodlyLUSGraphics.dll          ← the plugin, 87 KB
└── README_StixUngodlyLUSGraphics.txt   ← the full manual — keep it

II

Step II: Copy the DLL into BepInEx\plugins

Copy StixUngodlyLUSGraphics.dll into BepInEx\plugins\, right beside the Directors DLL if you installed Chapter II. Directly in plugins (as pictured) or in its own subfolder — both work.

Lovecraft's Untold Stories\
└── BepInEx\
    └── plugins\
        ├── StixUngodlyLUSDirectors.dll   ← Chapter II (optional but recommended)
        └── StixUngodlyLUSGraphics.dll

⊕ 1920×1080

III

Step III: Launch once and verify

Start the game. On this first boot:

• BepInEx\LogOutput.log gains the line StixUngodlyLUSGraphics v1.1.0 by StixsworldHD (StixsmasterHD4k) loaded. 15 Harmony patches active.
• The config file BepInEx\config\stixsworldhd.lus.ungodlygraphics.cfg is generated (≈29 KB): 61 settings in 10 sections, each with Min/Max bounds and a GAMEPLAY: line. Defaults are pure vanilla — everything ×1.0 / 100%, fog off, post effects off, hidden features off, FPS Cap 60 (the vanilla lock, ready for you to break).

⊕ 1920×1080

IV

Step IV: Press F2

In game, press F2 — deliberately chosen so it can never collide with the Directors panel on F1. Ten tabs appear: General / Display / Camera / SF Lighting / Ambient & Fog / Dyn Lights / Post FX / Particles / Presets / Status. Everything applies instantly — lighting sharpness, fog, grading, particles, the FPS cap — live, mid-run.

⊕ 1920×1080

Field guide: the eight graphics sections

1 · Display & framerate

• Breaks the hardcoded 60 FPS lock the game applies to every PC at startup: cap anywhere from uncapped to 1000 FPS for high-refresh monitors. Game logic is delta-timed — nothing plays faster, it only looks smoother.
• VSync override (Off / On / Half-refresh) on top of the game's own toggle, driver frame-queue control for input-latency tuning, run-in-background, and a switch for the FPS counter that ships hidden inside every copy.

2 · Camera & view

• Pixel-perfect zoom ladder offset (−4…+4): zoom out for tactical awareness or in for claustrophobia, sprites staying razor crisp; plus a smooth FOV multiplier (0.60×–1.60×) for continuous framing — at 1.0 the vanilla pixel-perfect math stays byte-identical.
• Pixel-Perfect Camera Snap quantises the camera to the 32 px/unit art grid after follow/shake/zoom run, killing diagonal-walk sprite shimmer.
• Unlocks the developers' own live Numpad + / Numpad − / Enter zoom keys for normal play, plus camera follow-speed and zoom-transition-speed multipliers.
• Screen Shake 0–300% — the motion-sickness accessibility slider the game never had (0 = fully off), or triple it if you like your explosions felt.

3 · SF Lighting quality (the game's signature 2D soft-shadow renderer)

• Light Map Scale and Shadow Map Scale divisors exposed (vanilla PC: 8 / 4). Drop them to 2–4 / 1.5–2 and torch glows and cast shadows go from soft blobs to crisply defined light — the single biggest visual upgrade available. Raise them to 16–32 and weak GPUs gain serious FPS (cost scales with the square of these numbers).
• Master toggle for 2D soft shadows, light penetration into casters, shadow-seam compensation, linear vs. soft light blending, and Global Light Exposure — one dial that multiplies every 2D light at once.
• HDR Lighting force-on switches the light map to a high-precision format and visibly reduces the banding rings around torches and glow effects.

4 · Ambient, mood & fog

• Ambient Brightness multiplier + Black Lift, applied live on top of every room's hand-authored ambient colour — re-applied on each room change through the game's own path, so per-room mood authorship survives.
• Colour Temperature and Green–Magenta Tint: full white-balance of the world, plus an engine-ambient multiplier stacking on the vanilla Brightness slider.
• The dormant fog layer. The game ships a complete 2D volumetric-style fog system — colour, strength, light-scatter glow, shadow-carved scatter — with its shader in every copy. The developers just never turned it on. This plugin does. Fog Strength 0.10–0.25 + Scatter 0.8 + Shadow Mix 0.7 makes torches bloom halos through drifting murk with shadow shafts cut through them.

5 · Dynamic lights (hidden dev feature)

• Unlocks the finished-but-disabled normal-map lighting system (the p_normalMap switch buried in the dev console): real engine point lights shade surfaces with genuine 3D depth as light moves past — with intensity and range multipliers once unlocked.
• Player Light brightness and radius multipliers: literally see further into the dark. Hooks the same pristine values the game's own sight-items scale, so item bonuses still stack on top exactly like vanilla.

6 · Colour grading & Post FX (shader-independent — can never pink-screen)

• Brightness/Gamma: positive values use a soft screen-blend lift that brightens shadows without clipping whites; negative crushes to black.
• Permanent cinematic Vignette (+corner blur, +blur spread) driven through the game's own high-quality vignette shader that vanilla only flashes during madness — the madness effect keeps 100% ownership of its pulse.
• Baseline Chromatic Aberration for a constant anamorphic-lens fringe; Madness Aberration % scales — or fully disables, for accessibility — the sanity-break pulse itself.
• Animated Film Grain (1–4 px), CRT Scanlines (1–4 px) and cinematic Letterbox Bars — generated at runtime from tiny procedural textures + Unity's always-included blend shader. The HUD draws above the bars.
• When every post setting sits at neutral, the whole pass self-removes from the camera: a true zero-cost vanilla render path.

7 · Texture & filtering

• Sprite Filtering force: Point (razor retro pixels), Bilinear or Trilinear — applied live to every loaded texture with per-texture originals remembered (fonts excluded so text stays clean), fully reversible.
• Texture Quality (Full/Half/Quarter/Eighth) for VRAM-starved machines, Anisotropic force, and MSAA 0/2/4/8 for rotated-sprite edges.

8 · Effects & particles

• Particle Density 10–300%: every blood spray, muzzle flash and gib count, scaled per-system with originals cached — 100% restores vanilla exactly.
• Particle Hard Cap: an emergency per-system ceiling so worst-case effect pileups can never tank your frame rate, even at 300%. Plus Soft Particles force, Particle Raycast Budget and Pixel Light Count.

The Presets tab — one-click looks

Suggested starting recipes

Performance, safety & compatibility

• Idle cost is effectively zero: no per-frame allocations, no polling. Registries refresh only on the game's own room-change call; a 1 Hz tick re-asserts a handful of engine values by comparison. The post-FX pass detaches itself whenever brightness / grain / scanlines / bars are all neutral.
• The heavy knobs: Light/Shadow Map Scale pushed toward 1 (cost rises with the square), MSAA 8, and Particle Density 300 in crowded fights. The Status tab's live frame-time readout is right there while you experiment; potato levers are map scales up, Texture Quality down, Particle Density down + Hard Cap.
• Verified hooks: every hook was resolved against the real shipped assemblies by an automated 72-point verification — all 15 patch targets plus every reflected field — not guessed from documentation. All shader work uses only shaders guaranteed present in every copy, so nothing here can ever pink-screen from a stripped shader.
• Companion by construction: zero shared Harmony patch targets with the Directors mod — Directors patches the enemy/generation/damage pipeline, this patches only rendering, camera and graphics-settings methods. Directors' pack-size hordes and this plugin's Particle Density coexist untouched. Run both.
• DLC-proof & save-safe: hooks target the universal camera, renderer, zone-manager and quality systems every zone flows through; every touched value is snapshotted first. Master Enable OFF (or removing the DLL) restores 100% vanilla instantly — textures, particles, lights and the player lantern included — and the vanilla options menu keeps full authority underneath.

Changelog

v1.1.0

• The hardware mouse cursor is now forced visible and unlocked for the entire time the F2 panel is open (previously the game's always-hidden cursor + gameplay pointer-lock could leave you with no usable pointer over the panel). State is snapshotted on open, enforced every frame so nothing the game does can re-hide or re-lock it mid-session, and on close control is handed back through the game's own input state machine (with a snapshot fallback) — keyboard, gamepad and menu contexts all restore their exact vanilla cursor behaviour.
• No other behaviour, setting, default or patch target changed. Config files from v1.0.0 are fully compatible as-is.

v1.0.0

• Initial release: 61 settings across 10 sections, F2 panel, 7 presets, 15 Harmony patches, full snapshot/restore vanilla safety.