When you’re building your own gun MOD for 7 Days to Die, you’ll run into moments where you want to swap the firing flame (the muzzle flash) for one of your own. This Custom Muzzle Flash (author: closerex / category: Utilities) appears to be a helper MOD for MOD creators that lets you do that swap without any tedious setup.
What Kind of MOD Is This?
Rather than a MOD that’s fun to play with, this appears to be a MOD that serves as a foundation for modders who build guns.
According to the author’s explanation, adding a custom muzzle flash used to require steps like “add a part when firing starts, and remove it when firing stops,” and even demanded additional condition checks to make the flame appear and disappear at the correct timing. Meanwhile, blocks have a mechanism where you can specify a particle just by writing a path in ParticleName, and this MOD appears to have been created out of the concern, “Why is only the muzzle flash this complicated?”
When you install this MOD, it registers the resource paths you write in the muzzle-related properties with the game, so the mechanism appears to be that you can make your own custom firing effect light up just by setting the properties.
Key Features
- There appear to be four supported properties (note that a separate set is provided for first-person view = fpv):
Particles_muzzle_fire/Particles_muzzle_fire_fpv(firing flame)Particles_muzzle_smoke/Particles_muzzle_smoke_fpv(firing smoke)
- There’s a note that from A21 onward, the lifetime of the muzzle flash is managed by the
TemporaryObjectscript. - The source code appears to be published on GitHub.
Installation Tips
Like a typical MOD, it will presumably be loaded by placing it in the Mods folder. In addition, since this MOD includes code (a DLL), it’s stated that you need to turn off EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat). If you use it in multiplayer, be careful about how you handle both the server and the client.
When preparing your own custom particles, as noted in the author’s technical notes, it appears important that the particle system components are designed to be “non-looping, short-lived, and self-destructing” (because the game force-emits 10 particles immediately after spawning, and its behavior is to discard objects that don’t have a particle component). If yours ends up continuously emitting on its own, it’s recommended to disable the emission module.
Who Is This For?
- Modders who are building their own gun MODs and want to sweat the details right down to the firing effects
- Anyone who finds the vanilla “AddPart/RemovePart” approach to muzzle flash implementation cumbersome
- Anyone who wants to craft separate firing flames or smoke for first-person and third-person views
Conversely, for a regular player who just wants to change a gun’s appearance as part of playing, keep in mind that on its own this is strictly a “groundwork” MOD whose effect is hard to see.