A mod for Road to Vostok that smooths over a few quirks around ammo checking, canted aim and scope positioning.

What it changes

Ammo check no longer forces weapon into raised position (bug fix)

Vanilla bug: after an ammo check, the weapon snaps to the raised position regardless of whether you were carrying it raised or lowered before the check.
Fix: the weapon's prior raised/lowered state is captured before the check and restored after, so you stay in whichever stance you were in.

Canted no longer blocked while looking at an interactable (bug fix)

Vanilla bug: pointing at an interactable (door, item, container) silently disables the canted toggle until you look away. Nothing in the UI hints at this and it's easy to think the keybind is broken.
Fix: the interaction gate on canted is removed, so canted toggles regardless of what you're looking at.

Canted aim is its own action

Vanilla treats canted as a sub-action of aiming: you have to be aiming first, and releasing aim drops you out of canted.

This mod makes canted independent:

• Press/hold canted from any weapon-ready state. You don't have to enter aim mode first.
• Canted respects your aim-mode setting (hold vs toggle), separately from the aim button.
• Sprinting, reloading or doing an ammo check cancels canted, mirroring how those cancel aim-toggle.
• The canted weapon pose is nudged slightly down so the gun obscures less of the upper screen.

Canted-hold auto-activates the laser

In hold aim mode, holding canted now also turns the equipped laser sight on; releasing canted turns it off. Convenient for quick low-light snap shots without juggling the laser key.

• Only fires in hold mode. Toggle-aim users keep manual laser control as in vanilla.
• If your laser was already on before you entered canted, the mod leaves it alone, no flicker on release.
• The attachment click sound is split into press (in) and release (out) halves, so holding canted feels like holding a physical button: you hear it click in when you engage and click out when you let go.

PIP scope mode: more realistic, more consistent

Picture-in-picture mode renders the world through the scope as a subviewport rather than zooming the main camera. The intent is to feel like you're actually looking through the optic. Two tweaks push that further:

• Realistic eye relief regardless of how the scope is mounted. Real magnified optics have a narrow eye-relief window: mount the scope too far forward or back on the rail and you'd get scope shadow that vignettes the sight picture down to an unusable speck. Rather than restrict where you can position the scope along the rail, the mod parks the camera at the proper distance behind the rear lens automatically, so the picture through the optic stays clean wherever you've slid the scope.
• Main camera FOV no longer narrows when scoped. Vanilla zooms your overall screen FOV in on top of the PIP magnification, a leftover from the pre-PIP zoom era. The result is that the world around the scope ring also shrinks toward the center, which never happens looking through real glass. The mod keeps the main camera at your base FOV so only the inside of the optic magnifies, the way a real scope works.
• LPVOs stay "scoped" at 1x. Vanilla flips DOF blur, scope sway and other scoped systems off at 1x and back on at higher zoom, so dialing magnification toggles between two different visual modes. A real LPVO is glass in front of your eye at every setting; the mod keeps scoped status on across all zoom levels so all three feel like the same optic at different magnifications.
• Magnification dialed to real-world values. Prism sights (HAMR, ACOG) sit at a fixed 4x. LPVOs (Leupold, VUDU) step through 1.1x, 3x and 6x across their low/mid/high settings, in line with the variable optics they're modeled on.
• Scope depth-of-field reworked. Vanilla applies a single fixed blur to far distances only, regardless of magnification, leaving anything close to the camera (scope body, receiver, foreground cover) razor-sharp. The mod scales DOF intensity with magnification (1× LPVO setting gets none, higher zoom gets progressively more) and enables near-DOF too, so the foreground softens alongside the background. The result feels closer to how a real magnified optic locks focus at the target distance and lets everything else fall off.

Mouse sensitivity scales with zoom

Vanilla picks mouse speed from your Look / Aim / Scope sensitivity sliders based on whether you're aiming and scoped. A few cases get the wrong slider; the mod fixes them:

• Canted aim now uses your Aim sensitivity. Vanilla flags canted as "not aiming" internally and ends up running the (much faster) Look slider during canted, which makes the pose hard to control. While canted, the mod mirrors your Look slider to your Aim slider; restored on canted exit.
• Variable-scope sensitivity scales with magnification. Tunable optics ran a single Scope slider value across all zoom levels, so a low-power and high-power setting had the same mouse feel even though the apparent angular rate is very different. Now:
  • LPVO at the 1× setting uses the Aim slider, since it's effectively a red-dot stance.
  • LPVO at the middle setting uses the Scope slider, your baseline.
  • LPVO at the high setting uses Scope × 0.5, halved so the high-zoom pose stays controllable.

Fixed scopes (prism sights) are untouched, they keep using your Scope slider directly as in vanilla.

Net effect: tune Look / Aim / Scope once and the mod picks the right slider per situation.

Patrol mode

The default lowered weapon mode is replaced with much more comfortable patrol mode where rifle rests across your chest.

• Applies to all long guns
• Does not needlessly obstruct view
• Does not trick you into thinking you can shoot from this mode

Why this is one mod and not several

These changes started out as separate mods. The catch is that Road to Vostok's scripts have a handful of "god" methods that fold a lot of unrelated behavior into a single function and mix state mutation with rendering side effects in the same call. Hooking a method through the mod loader is all-or-nothing, you can't override only part of a function. So as soon as one fix needed to touch, say, Handling.WeaponHandling, every other tweak that also lives in that method had to ship in the same mod or get clobbered by it. That's how the ammo-check, canted, laser and PIP changes ended up bundled together.

Known issues

• Laser beam doesn't line up with the dot at very close range. On targets right in front of you the visible beam diverges from the projected dot. This is a vanilla bug, not something the mod introduces. Vanilla simply hid it by having the gun model block the close portion of the beam; this mod's tweaked weapon pose moves the gun out of that path, exposing the misalignment.

Requirements

• Road to Vostok 0.1.1.3 (Godot 4.6.2)
• Metro Mod Loader v3.0.1 or later (separate install, not bundled with the game)

Compatibility

This mod hooks four vanilla methods through Metro Mod Loader:

Full replacements (other mods that also replace these will conflict, pick one):

• Handling.WeaponHandling
• WeaponRig.AmmoCheck

Post hooks (additive, run after vanilla, coexist with other mods cleanly):

• WeaponRig.ADS
• Camera.ScopeDOF

Install

Drop likhos-weapon-handling-fixes.vmz into your game's mods/ folder. On a default Steam install:

<Steam>\steamapps\common\Road to Vostok\mods\

Launch the game. The mod loader picks it up automatically. The first time you install or update a mod, the loader does a one-shot restart to finish wiring the hooks. After that, no more restarts.

Uninstall

Delete likhos-weapon-handling-fixes.vmz from the mods/ folder and relaunch the game.