What it adds to tooltips

• Research time — an hourglass and a number on every research and upgrade. Armour 3 reads "40 res, 120 seconds" instead of just "40 res".
• Cooldown — a stopwatch on commander abilities: Bone Wall, Power Surge, Nutrient Mist, Rupture, Heal Wave, Cyst, and the rest.
• Health and armour — for anything you drop, build or manufacture, on both teams.
• Movement speed — for the things that move: ARC, MAC, Drifter, Whip, Shade, Shift, Crag.

The "In Cooldown" panel

The alien hive panel

• Biomass — one icon per +1 biomass research that hive has completed. A fresh hive shows none, the same way it shows no hive type icon until it is upgraded, and each research adds its own button's art.
• Researching — the game's own rotating "working" ring with the DNA glyph inside it, on any hive researching anything: biomass, a lifeform ability, or a hive type upgrade. The same pair you see in the world when you look at a busy hive.

Fixes to vanilla display bugs

• Simultaneous biomass research. With two hives researching biomass at once the tech map lit up only one icon between them, because the team collapses every hive into a single number before drawing. Two hives now light two icons, three light three.
• Supply icons. The supply figure on a tooltip was marked with a MAC or a Drifter while the HUD's top bar used a different pair of icons for the same thing. The tooltip now uses the top bar's. The MAC and Drifter icons are untouched wherever they stand for the units themselves.
• Uncoloured biomass icons. The biomass icon was drawn as bare greyscale art wherever it appeared: on the commander tooltip, on the spectator counter, and so on the hive panel too. Nothing else in a tooltip or in the tech tree stays uncoloured, so it read as unfinished rather than deliberate. All of them now take the tech map's own colour for researched alien tech.
• Lost arms lab upgrades. When a team loses every arms lab, or they all lose power, the weapon and armour icons on the marine HUD simply vanished - which looks exactly like never having researched them. They now stay on screen in the alert red the base game already defined for this and never showed, so "we lost it" reads differently from "we never had it".

Live values

The biomass bar

Spectating and tournament play

• Supply on the spectator bar. It carries resources, resource towers and alien biomass, but never supply. Both teams' supply now sits on it, used against maximum, and nothing new is sent to get it.
• Ready state on the scoreboard. Under Shine's tournament mode each team's header is marked ready in green or not ready in red, with a tick or a cross beside it. Both come off at round start, and nothing is drawn on a server without that plugin. Shine announces readiness only when it changes, so a client joining mid pre game sees an already ready team marked not ready until the next change.

Settings

Works with other mods

Servers

BDT Community Balance Mod revision 3.6 (dev)

What it does

• Before the round starts, the alien commander sees a "SELECT STARTING LOCATION" panel listing every hive location available on the map.
• Whatever the commander selects becomes the alien starting hive.
• The marine base is placed at a different start location, chosen at random from the map's valid opposing spawns for the alien's pick.
• The selection is highlighted in green and syncs to the alien team so everyone can see the chosen spot.
• The alien team gets a chat message announcing the pick, tagged "[Hive Spawn Selector]" in magenta, naming every legal marine spawn for it too (not which one actually won the random draw) — configurable to the commander only, see Server admin below.

Recommended setup

• Strongly recommended: run a "ready up before the round starts" plugin, such as Shine's Tournament Mode, so both teams lock in and the countdown only begins once everyone is ready. Without one, the alien commander may only get a few seconds to pick before the round starts on its own.
• Specifically avoid the common setup where the round auto-starts a fixed countdown (e.g. 15 seconds) as soon as both teams have a commander, with teams shuffled partway through (e.g. 5 seconds before the round begins). That leaves no good moment to pick: choosing before the shuffle announces the pick to the current alien roster, and the shuffle can then move roughly half of them onto Marines — so part of the enemy team sees the pick before the round even begins. Choosing after the shuffle is too late either way, since spawns are resolved almost immediately alongside it.

Server admin

• sv_spawnselect true/false — enable or disable alien spawn selection (enabled by default).
• configs/HiveSpawnSelectorConfig.json — set "AnnounceToWholeTeam" to false to send the pick announcement to the alien commander only instead of the whole team, if your server can't avoid the shuffle-timing issue above.

Compatibility

• Do not run alongside NSL — it drives the same underlying spawn setting and the two mods will fight over it.
• Works alongside Shine's CustomSpawns plugin (from Shine-Epsilon) automatically. If it's installed and configured for the current map, the picker restricts itself to the locations CustomSpawns allows aliens to start at, and pairs marines using its own legal combinations. No configuration needed here — it's detected automatically, and every other map or server falls back to the behavior above.

Additional Credits