Stealth Drive (Cloaking)

News

New 1x1x1 large grid stealth drive has been added, may add others at a later date.

Some new config options have been added to limit drive operation in or out of water.

Custom drives and heat sinks can now be defined in the world/server config file. See patch notes for more details.

Thanks to a tip from a commenter I discovered how to dynamically hide armour edges, so they are no longer completely disabled when this mod is loaded. You may notice some differences in appearance, especially during stealth fade in/out.

This had the side effect of making stealthed grids far too visible to clients with Anti-aliasing turned off (default on low graphics), so grids will now be completely invisible if you have Anti-aliasing disabled. I recommend having it on for best visuals.

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Overview

This mod adds the stealth drive to the game, allowing ships to become almost invisible and undetectable by weapons. It also contains heat sink blocks, which allow ships to remain in stealth for longer before needing to drop out to vent accumulated heat.

This mod is intended for use with WeaponCore; WC weapons will not be able to detect or lock onto ships in stealth. I'm not currently planning on trying to make this work the same way in vanilla, as there is no easy way to tell vanilla weapons not to target something.

I decided to add a feature to at least prevent vanilla turrets from automatically targeting cloaked grids; this won't stop players from being able to bring up a reticle on you and lock onto your ship, but it will have to do for the moment. At least it will let you sneak up on NPCs :)

I do plan on making improvements and potentially adding more features over time; if you encounter any bugs please let me know in the comments or ping me in the WeaponCore discord.

Discord Link

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Features

Stealth Drive

Stealths a ship or station, any connected grids, and any detached grids/players/floating objects within the stealth field. The stealth field is considered to be a cuboid, aligned with the parent grid, and encompassing the full extent of any other grids mechanically connected to the parent grid.

The power required to enter stealth is proportional to the surface area of the stealth field, while the stealth duration is dependent only on the number of Heat Sink blocks on the grid. When stealth is disabled, either manually or by time running out and the heat sinks needing to discharge built up heat, the drive will go into cooldown for the same duration that stealth was active. While cooling down, a heat signature will be visible to players within a distance proportional to the drive's power consumption.

Heat Sink

Accumulates heat produced during cloaking, venting it into space afterward. While heat sinks are not strictly necessary for cloaking, the drive itself can only store a limited amount of heat and thus cloak time is limited without additional heat sinks. These can be placed anywhere on the grid without needing to be mounted on the drive directly; it is recommended to mount them externally to prevent the discharge of heat from vaporising parts of your ship!

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Tips

Set Anti-aliasing to FXAA in your graphics settings for best results, allowing you to see a very faint outline of a stealthed ship nearby. To counter this, certain paint schemes can enhance the optical camouflage of your ship, making it almost impossible to visually detect a stealthed ship unless it is right on top of you.

You can have multiple stealth drives on your ship at once, but only one of them will be functional at a time. Heat sinks however are only limited by PCU, so if you want you can make a pure stealth ship that can go invisible for long periods of time, but is only very lightly armed (or not at all).

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Configuration Options

The mod will generate a config file inside your world's save folder. The path should be something like this: \AppData\Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Saves\76561198140591171\... ...\MyWorld\Storage\2805859069_StealthSystem\

Inside the file are the following configuration options:

FadeTime - Length of time over which stealthed grids will fade to invisible. ShieldDelay - Time before shields are re-enabled after leaving stealth. JumpPenalty - Time subtracted from remaining stealth duration when a jump drive is discharged. Transparency - Percentage of transparency of stealthed grids - 1 is fully transparent/invisible, 0 is fully visible/opaque. DisableShields - Whether shields should be disabled while in stealth. DamageThreshold - Amount of damage a stealthed grid can take before dropping out of stealth. If this is set to 0, taking damage will not disable stealth. DisableWeapons - Whether weapons should be disabled while in stealth. If false, stealthed grids can fire weapons but will lose stealth if their weapons cause damage to anything. HideThrusterFlames - Whether thruster flames should be hidden while in stealth. WorkInWater - Whether stealth can be engaged while the grid is submerged. WorkOutOfWater - Whether stealth can be engaged while the grid is not submerged. WaterTransitionDepth - Height in metres above water (below if negative) to enable/disable drive in either of the above cases. RevealOnDamage - Whether stealthed grids should be revealed when their weapons hit something. DriveSettings ⠀⠀Subtype - Subtype ID of a block of type UpgradeModule to use as a drive. ⠀⠀Duration - Stealth time provided by the drive itself.