Cleared Ratte | Nuclear Option

Deliberate landing guidance for Nuclear Option.

The game only draws its landing glideslope when you happen to fly within 5 km of a friendly base. Cleared Ratte lets you nominate the base you actually intend to land at, and the game's own approach overlay then draws the glideslope and runway markers to it from any distance.

Extracted from MKMods into its own plugin so you can run the landing guidance without the rest of that mod.

How it works

Three ways to pick your landing base, whichever suits your setup:

• Lower the gear. Gear down away from the ground reads as intent to land, so the nearest friendly airbase with a usable runway is selected automatically. No keybind, no menu.

• Press the select key (default L). First press picks the nearest base, each further press cycles outwards, and one press past the last base turns guidance off again. Also accepts JoystickButton0–19, so it can live on a HOTAS.

• Pick the base on the maximized map. Click its icon, or put the map cursor over it and press your map Select bind (mouse or controller). Clicking the same base again turns guidance off.

  The game blanks every airbase icon the moment you are sitting in an aircraft — invisible and unclickable, because the native handler only serves spawn selection — so Cleared Ratte keeps them drawn and clickable while you fly.

Whichever way you pick, the chosen base is confirmed in the action report along with the runway the tower assigned you, and highlighted on the map. The runway is chosen with the same query the game uses for its own auto-landing, so aircraft weight, landing speed, runway length and tailhook are all taken into account.

If the tower would refuse you — an arrestor deck and no tailhook, or a strip the game considers too short — you still get the approach picture, and the report says so: guidance only, tower will not clear you. You asked to be shown the approach; whether it clears you is its business.

Carrier decks are handled throughout. The deck is led by its own velocity, so gates, needles, range and time-to-go all point at where the deck will be when you arrive rather than where it is now — which is most of a mile out of date from a long final. Sunk carriers drop out of the cycle.

The approach picture appears immediately on selection, gear up or down, all the way from the other side of the map if you want it.

The approach picture

Instead of the game's single glideslope line, Cleared Ratte draws the approach the way a modern HUD would. Every line is a clone of one of the game's own overlay graphics, so it inherits the HUD material, canvas and scaling rather than looking bolted on.

Highway in the sky. A tunnel of gates sitting on the 3.4° glidepath, spaced geometrically so perspective spreads them evenly at any range, with rails along the bottom corners and a heavier gate at the touchdown point. The runway outline is drawn from any distance. On path the gates nest around your velocity vector; off path the stack visibly skews, long before a needle would move. Carrier decks are handled — gate positions lead the deck by its own velocity, using the same aimpoint math the game uses.

Deviation cluster. Hung off the velocity vector: an ILS localizer scale (±2.5°) and glidepath scale (±0.7°) with needles you fly toward, a virtual PAPI that reads white-white-red-red on path, and two lines of numbers — slant range and time to go, then speed and how far off the reference speed you are. Deviation is deliberately not written out: the needles and the PAPI already say it, and saying it twice is what makes a HUD read as a debug overlay.

Everything shifts green → amber → red with deviation. Instrument lines are snapped to whole device pixels so hairlines stay hairlines; world geometry is left unsnapped, because quantising something that moves every frame trades a little softness for shimmer. Gates fade with distance and the touchdown frame stays bright, so the corridor recedes into the aim point instead of every line competing at the same weight.

DisplayScale sizes the cluster and its text; TunnelGates sets how many gates the tunnel is built from.

Declutter

The game ships an unfinished landing mode — CombatHUD.landingMode and HUDUnitMarker.SetLandingMode() exist but nothing ever switches them on. The only decluttering you actually get is unit markers hiding when the gear comes down, which is why it feels like it happens at landing clearance, and why it happens far too late to help you find the runway.

Cleared Ratte clears the combat clutter the moment you select a base, and puts back exactly what it took away when you turn guidance off. By default that is the unit markers, objective pointer and hit markers, the target designator, off-screen target arrow and target label, and the floating airbase name and range marker — the approach picture already shows you where the base is. The weapon reticle, weapon status panel and threat list can be added, but are left alone by default — being shot at on final is worth knowing about.

Installation

1. Install BepInEx 5 into the Nuclear Option game folder and launch the game once so it generates its folders.

2. Copy the ClearedRatte folder from the release into Nuclear Option/BepInEx/plugins/, so you end up with:

   BepInEx/plugins/ClearedRatte/ClearedRatte.dll
   

3. Launch the game. Config is written to BepInEx/config/dev.sewerlabs.clearedratte.cfg.

Configuration

Settings are editable in-game with ConfigurationManager.

1. General:

Setting	Default	Description
Enable mod	true	Master switch for the whole mod.

2. Airbase selection — picking the base:

Setting	Default	Description
Select airbase key	L	Cycles friendly airbases nearest-first; one press past the last turns guidance off. Accepts JoystickButton0–19 too.
Auto-select on gear down	true	Lowering the gear selects the nearest friendly airbase automatically.

3. Approach display — what gets drawn:

Setting	Default	Description
Glidepath tunnel	true	Fly-through gates down the glidepath, with runway outline and rails, replacing the native glideslope line.
Landing instruments	true	Localizer and glidepath scales, virtual PAPI and data block at the velocity vector.
Instrument size	1.0	Size of the landing instruments, 0.4–2.0. Below 1 is tighter and further out of the way.
Tunnel gate count	9	How many gates the tunnel is built from, 3–14. Fewer is cleaner, more reaches further out.
Glideslope line with gear up	true	With Glidepath tunnel off: draw the native line on selection instead of only with the gear down.

Turn both display options off to keep the stock glideslope line and use Cleared Ratte purely for picking the base.

4. HUD declutter — what gets cleared away while a base is selected:

Setting	Default	Description
Declutter during approach	true	Master switch. Clears the HUD on selection instead of waiting for the gear-down hiding on short final.
Hide unit markers	true	HUD unit markers, objective pointer and hit markers.
Hide airbase label	true	The floating airbase name and range marker for the selected base.
Hide target markers	true	Target designator, off-screen target arrow and target label.
Hide weapon reticle	false	The weapon reticle in the middle of the HUD. The weapon UI stops updating while hidden.
Hide weapon status panel	false	The weapon status panel in the top right corner.
Hide threat list	false	The threat list.

Building

Requires the .NET SDK and a local Nuclear Option install (the game assemblies are referenced directly).

dotnet build ClearedRatte.sln -c Release

The default game directory is Y:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Nuclear Option. Override it with:

dotnet build ClearedRatte.sln -c Release -p:GameDirectory="D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Nuclear Option"

A successful build deploys the DLL straight into <GameDirectory>/BepInEx/plugins/ClearedRatte.

Credits

Approach assist code by Lukas Struckl. Built on BepInEx and HarmonyX. Originally part of MKMods, a fork of mkualquiera/nuclear_option_modding.