Cold Contract

What's in the list

Three pillars: SAIN makes the bots fight like players instead of aimbots or statues; Black Division adds an elite faction that actively comes after you mid-raid; Icebreaker adds an entire new map with quests, a helicopter extract, and its own garrison. Around them sit content from EFT 1.0 backported into this version, climbable ladders everywhere, quality-of-life fixes, and eight small mods written just for this setup — including the one that puts its name on the main menu.

Entries below are tagged by what they change: FIX — a bug the mod shipped with is gone. TUNE — behaviour rebalanced, and adjustable in-game. NEW — something that didn't exist before this setup. UPDATED — brought current with the game version.

The mod list

The bots — SAIN, fixed where it counts

The theme of every change: bots act on what they could plausibly know, and they never get stuck — not in a doorway, not in their own heads.

They fight fair

• FixNo more map-wide telepathy. One bot spotting you used to tell its entire squad your exact position, from anywhere on the map. Callouts now respect radio range — about 150 m with earpieces, less without.
• TuneNo more cross-map manhunts. Bots marched the length of a map to a position someone reported once. Search range is capped at 250 m, adjustable.
• NewStandoffs end. Trade pot-shots from cover long enough and the bot stops peeking the same angle — it pushes or flanks. Snipers and close quarters are exempt.
• NewGas clears rooms. Unmasked bots cough, break and sprint out of a CS gas cloud, blinded and easy to hit. Masked bots hold their ground. Bots throw gas at you too.
• FixSmoke actually conceals. On this game version smoke had stopped blocking bot vision entirely — they tracked you straight through it. It screens you properly now, gas included.

They stopped being weird

• FixThe statues are gone. Bots that heard something indoors could stand motionless for up to two minutes. That pause is now 4–15 seconds.
• FixRat bots actually sneak. They shipped with a movement speed of literally zero while searching indoors, so they just stood there.
• FixNo more backwards sprinting, or sideways wandering. Bots face where they're going — walking as well as running — glancing around periodically instead of locking their head on one spot for five seconds while their feet go elsewhere. They also stop fixating on a position you left twenty seconds ago.
• FixStuck bots free themselves. Vault, jump, re-path, side-step, until they're moving again. Several of those steps previously did nothing at all.
• FixDoors don't defeat the AI anymore. The swinging door no longer knocks the opener sideways, bots stop closing doors in their own face, and one pressed against a door now opens it instead of crouch-walking into the wood.
• FixThe bots got cheaper to run. Every bot re-examined every player it knew about, every frame — including the ones asleep across the map. That work is now paced by how much it can matter. Same fight, less machine.
• FixTwo old bugs fell out of that work. Bots that went dormant when you walked away came back with their stuck-recovery switched off for the rest of the raid, and the “do I have a clear shot” check was measuring from the wrong point on the body.

The hunters — Black Division

An elite PMC faction that doesn't wait for you to find them. Make enough noise and a hunt squad gets dispatched to your position.

• FixThe hunt squad arrives at full strength. A spawn bug turned the 3–5 man squad into one lone bot. Hear the hunt trigger now and it means what it should.
• NewTheir dogtags are worth taking. Bodies drop faction tags — ferrum common, green rare, and their boss Wedge carries red about half the time. Ragman and Skier both barter for them.
• UpdatedThe whole faction runs on the current game version, including the newest boss and raider variants.

The expedition — Icebreaker

A full custom map: a research icebreaker locked in the ice, garrisoned by Black Division, with the six-quest Boreas storyline across four traders, keypad terminals with discoverable codes, and a helicopter extraction you call in with a flare — then hold the pad until it lands.

• FixThe five-second hitch is dead. Something swept the entire ship every few seconds, freezing a frame each time. Two of them found and cut.
• FixThe engine room no longer freezes the game. Its ambush squad used to appear in a single frame, a third of a second of lockup as you walked in. Same ambush, now spread over a few frames.
• FixThe helicopter sounds like a helicopter. Its audio played from a fixed point while the aircraft flew past it. Now it's bolted to the airframe — approach, flyby, touchdown.
• FixThe loading screen shut up. It used to blast dripping-water ambience at ten times its real volume across the whole load.
• Fix154 silent rooms got their sound back — engine hum, machinery and hull tones that moving the mod to this version had quietly dropped.
• FixYour profile is safe. A mod-loading bug could corrupt any profile carrying one of the map's quest items. Defused before it ever fired.
• TuneA clean log. Three hundred warnings per load, down to only what matters. Terminal passcodes still get written there — that's a feature, and it stayed.

The arsenal — world & content

• UpdatedEFT 1.0 content, today. Weapons, armor, gear and quests from the 1.0 release, including 298 item models missing from the install — all restored.
• NewFlashlights got a full service. The fake barrel shadow painted inside every beam is gone, and every light gets its own range and intensity sliders. Fixing it also repaired a broken patch in AmandsGraphics that had been killing both mods' flashlight features.
• UpdatedEvery ladder is climbable — all the ones BSG welded shut, on every map.
• UpdatedCS gas grenades — area denial that works both ways. Unmasked bots flee the cloud, masked bots hold.
• UpdatedCloud control — CloudSix keeps the skybox in check for cleaner long-range visibility.

Made for this setup

Seven small mods written to fix things nothing else covered.

Quest Session Reset Fix

Un-breaks the "100% complete but can't hand in" quest.

Some quests want everything done in a single raid. Die partway and the quest breaks: every objective shows a checkmark, but the hand-in button never appears again. This repairs it so the quest honestly reads as incomplete and can simply be run again — including quests that broke before the mod was installed. It deliberately doesn't hand you the reward; the run genuinely failed.

AutoWishlistFix

Hideout wishlist tags that tell the truth.

The game tags items your hideout needs but never checks whether you already have them, so the tag sits on your fifth spare as stubbornly as your first. Now yellow means still collecting, green means stocked — anything past the count is safe to sell — and zones under construction go quiet until they're built. Hover a tagged item in your stash or at a trader and the tooltip gives you the numbers.

ColdLoader

Faster raid loading, no Tab stutter.

The game rations loading work to a small slice of each frame — a slice sized around 60 fps and never scaled up since, so a fast machine waits exactly as long as a slow one. ColdLoader lifts that ration and cuts the dead time around it: the ten-second deploy screen after everything has loaded, and the pause before each request for bots.

Two in-raid fixes as well. Opening your inventory dropped frames every single time, because a garbage collection was running on the frame you pressed Tab — and leaving the collector switched on afterwards. And gear no longer loads strictly one piece at a time, a hard-drive-era caution that just costs you hitching on an SSD.

BotMagazineFix

Bots always spawn able to reload.

A PMC turned up with a PKM, fired his hundred rounds, then just stood there — his chest rig had no slot big enough for a spare box magazine, and nothing had checked. He had a backpack with room in it, and the game will happily let a bot reload from one; the spares were simply never put anywhere. Now they are. Bots that could already carry mags are untouched, but the machine gunner is no longer a one-belt novelty.

ColdVisuals

One dial for how the whole world looks.

Five things the game gets wrong about its own lighting, adjustable while you stand there looking at them. Shadows: it never asks the engine for more than half its available quality, even on Ultra. Night: a full moon lights pine needles far more than it lights the ground, so the moonlight slider is really the "stop the trees glowing" slider. Rain: after a minute every surface wears the same shine, asphalt and grass alike. Sharpness: distant ground is blurry because anisotropic filtering ships switched off. Water: reflections, distortion and colour.

Rather than forty sliders there are style dropdowns — Balanced, Gritty, Clarity, Cinematic, Vanilla — one at the top for everything, and one per part so you can mix gritty nights with glare-free wetness. Nothing is ever locked: move any slider and that part quietly switches to Custom.

Ammo Stack Multiplier

Bigger ammo stacks, configurable.

Less stash Tetris, fewer half-stacks. Survives game updates without reinstallation.

NoFakeBulletCrack

No more phantom bullets snapping past your ear.

Sniper zones fire two sounds at you. One is built from the shooter's real position and tells you where they are. The other has no position at all — a random clip, panned to a random side of your head, with a screen flinch bolted on — and it plays whether or not the shot was ever going to hit you. That second one isn't a bullet, it's a jump-scare. It's gone. You still hear a sniper zone engaging you, from the right direction.

ColdContract

This setup's nameplate.

Puts COLD CONTRACT on the main menu beneath the game's own main-menu title, set in its own typeface so it looks factory-fitted.

Why it holds together

Every mod here was written for an older version of the game, and each update breaks things quietly — a mod still loads, still says it's working, and half of it silently does nothing. Everything here was rebuilt against the current version and then checked for exactly that kind of invisible breakage. One mod passed every ordinary check with twenty-three dead features hiding inside it, all found and repaired before the map was ever played.

Stutters got the same treatment. Every frame drop that was fixed here was measured first — found, named, and cut at the source rather than papered over by turning settings down. That's the difference between a load order that launches and one that plays.

What was changed in other people's mods

Every mod here belongs to its author, and most of this setup is their work, not mine. What follows is the honest list of what I altered in someone else's mod and why — so nothing here is a mystery, and so credit lands where it belongs.

BigBrain, Waypoints, WTT-CommonLib, Simple Workout QTE and FixPluginTypesSerialization run completely untouched.

Credits & sources

Every mod belongs to its author. "Edited by MavercK" means the version in my own install carries local changes on top of the linked upstream; those changes stay on my machine and are not upstream releases.