Loot Glow

Loot Glow

Never walk past loot again. Loot Glow makes pickups in Gothic 1 Remake softly glow in color-coded categories, so items stand out in the world - no cluttered HUD, no minimap markers, just a gentle highlight you can toggle on and off.

Why this exists

The idea isn't mine. I was using an earlier Lua mod (LootGlow by PhilipForge) and loved the concept - but at the time I was using it, for me it stuttered badly and crashed often. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch as a native C++ UE4SS mod, built around that performance problem.

Instead of scanning the entire world every frame, Loot Glow hooks the engine the moment an item appears, colors it once, and then leaves it alone. No per-frame searching, no per-frame recoloring.

One thing I specifically wanted was snappier, more predictable control over glow intensity - and that worked out. Each category's brightness is a value in the config and it reacts cleanly.

Categories

Setting a color for every single item by hand would be madness, so items are sorted into color-coded categories: melee weapons, ranged weapons (bows), ammo, plants, food, potions, crafting materials, keys, scrolls, runes, jewels (amulets and rings), and a misc catch-all. Item stacks/bundles are inspected by their contents so they land in the right group too.

Not everything fits perfectly. Gothic has a lot of items and the sorting is best-effort by name. If something lands in the wrong group - or you think it belongs somewhere else - tell me: send the item name and where you think it should go, and I'll fold it into an update. There's a diagnostic switch in the config (debug_log_unknown) that prints item names and their assigned category to the UE4SS log to make that easy.

A note on bows

Bows use a skeletal mesh that can't take a clean colored glow (engine limitation - I tried hard, it ended in "invisible bow" every single time). Instead they get a fixed in-game burning / ember look. It reads great in the world and clearly marks them as loot - it just isn't color-configurable like the rest.

Configuration

Everything lives in config.json in the mod folder. You can set each category's color ("R,G,B", each 0-255) and intensity, turn individual categories on/off, and choose whether the glow starts on or off.

Colors and intensity reload live: just edit config.json, save, and toggle the glow off and on (your toggle key) - the change applies immediately, no game restart. (Other settings like the toggle key itself take effect on the next game start.)

The toggle key. toggle_key accepts either a keyboard key or a gamepad button - the mod figures out which automatically. Default is F4.

• []Keyboard: function keys F1 to F12, a letter (e.g. "G"), numpad ("NUM0"), or a raw hex virtual-key code ("0x73").[/]

  []Gamepad triggers / shoulders: "LT", "RT", "LB", "RB".[/]

  []Gamepad d-pad and menu: "DPAD_UP", "DPAD_DOWN", "DPAD_LEFT", "DPAD_RIGHT", "START", "BACK".[/]

  []Gamepad face buttons (A / B / X / Y): write these with a pad_ prefix - "pad_a", "pad_b", "pad_x", "pad_y" - because a bare A to Z is read as a keyboard key.[/]

  Example: to toggle the glow with the right trigger, set "toggle_key": "RT".

  Tuning tip: dial intensity in daylight, from the bottom up. A glow looks much stronger at night (dark background) than in broad daylight (bright background) - so if you tune it at night, you'll likely set it too low and it'll be nearly invisible during the day. So: tune in daylight, and approach the value from below - start low and raise it just until it reads clearly in the daytime. A glow that's comfortably visible by day will look great at night too. (Heads up: a few categories like potions and runes use very small intensity values on purpose, because their in-game material multiplies brightness - nudge those gently.)

  Is it stable?

  Let's be honest about the stack: this is hobbyist C++ from some guy on the internet (hi), reaching into the game's live assets, through an experimental build of UE4SS (itself not exactly famous for rock-solid stability), inside a game that... has its moments. So - miracles not guaranteed. :)

  That said, I genuinely put a lot of work into making it as stable as I could. It discovers items via engine events (no brittle per-frame scanning), cleanly restores the original materials when you toggle it off, never touches objects that are being dest