AscentFPS — first-person mode for The Ascent

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Please note!

• This mod was made with the help of AI!
• The game was designed for a top-down view, so I personally recommend playing through it the first time the way the developers intended.
• Because of the original perspective, first person reveals holes in textures and other things that cannot be seen from above. These have not been fixed and there are currently no plans to fix them.
• I found it much easier to get lost on the map in first person. If you have trouble finding your way, you can switch back to the normal view at any time with F5, or try the setting that puts a floor plan under the radar.
• Despite a lot of testing, crashes are still possible when using the mod. Keep that in mind. I will try to fix them.
• This mod is for single-player only. In multiplayer modes it switches itself off.

Play The Ascent from the character's eyes instead of the top-down camera: free mouse look, movement that follows your view, a weapon in front of you, a crosshair, and the game's own aiming and shooting pointed where you look.

It is a single UE4SS Lua mod. No pak files, no game files replaced; delete one folder to remove it.

Video demonstration

First-person view

Action view

Settings

What the mod adds

View

• First-person camera at eye height with unlimited mouse look; adjustable field of view, sensitivity and eye height.
• The game's own movement (WASD or gamepad stick), dodge and aiming follow the direction you look.
• Smooth crouching (Ctrl); raising the weapon (right mouse button) while crouched lifts the view, like peeking over cover.
• Subtle head bob when walking.
• Ceilings stay in place indoors — the game normally fades them away for the top-down camera. (Not a recommended setting: even with ceilings there are hardly any textures up there.)
• Adjustable glow (bloom): muzzle effects are right in front of the lens in first person and would otherwise white out the screen. (There are still problems with some weapons that fire very brightly.)

Weapon

• The carried weapon is shown as a view model in front of the camera; size and position are adjustable.
• Recoil kick per shot, scaled by the weapon's own stats (slow, heavy weapons kick more; steady beam weapons do not kick).
• The weapon's laser sight starts at the muzzle instead of the middle of the screen, and can be turned off (better left on).

Interface

• Crosshair. (It does not always match where the shots go. Better rely on the laser.)
• Interaction prompts ("[F] Open", lifts, stations, vendors) and hints such as "Access denied" are shown under the crosshair instead of at a position that only made sense from above.
• Optional: a live floor plan under the dots of the game's radar, so you can see walls and passages.
• An in-game settings menu.

Keys

Key	Action
F5	Switch between first person and the original view (the camera flies there)
F6	Settings menu
- / +	Camera further away / closer: from first person (0 %) to the original view (100 %)

Menus, the journal, vendors, the taxi list, cutscenes and the pause menu get the normal camera and a free mouse cursor automatically. Alt-tabbing releases the cursor as well.

Requirements

• The Ascent on Steam (tested on the build with Unreal Engine 4.26), Windows.
• RE-UE4SS v3.0.1.

Installation

Download the mod from the Releases page, not from the repository itself: the repository holds the version in development.

1. Install RE-UE4SS v3.0.1 into The Ascent\TheAscent\Binaries\Win64\ (so that dwmapi.dll, UE4SS.dll, UE4SS-settings.ini and the Mods folder sit next to TheAscent-Win64-Shipping.exe).
2. Open UE4SS-settings.ini and set:

   bUseUObjectArrayCache = false
   GraphicsAPI = dx11
   HookBeginPlay = 0

3. Open Mods\mods.txt and set:

   BPModLoaderMod : 0
   BPML_GenericFunctions : 0
   

4. Download AscentFPS-x.xx.zip from the latest release and unpack it into Binaries\Win64\Mods\, so that you get Mods\AscentFPS\. It contains enabled.txt, so it loads without an entry in mods.txt.
5. Start the game and load a single-player save. First person is on by default.

Steps 2 and 3 are not optional: with the default settings UE4SS itself crashes this game — on the main menu (bUseUObjectArrayCache) and at random while levels stream in, most often in combat (HookBeginPlay).

Uninstall: delete Mods\AscentFPS (or only its enabled.txt to disable it).

Settings

Press F6 in game. Up / Down selects a row, Left / Right changes the value (hold to repeat), Enter toggles or resets. To switch tabs, move up onto the tab bar and press Left / Right. Changes apply immediately and are saved to Mods\AscentFPS\AscentFPS.cfg.

Console

The same settings are available in the UE console (F10, enabled by UE4SS): afps prints the current values, afps <name> <value> sets one, afps reset restores the defaults, afps toggle is the same as F5.

Name	Setting		Name	Setting
sens	mouse sensitivity		weapon	weapon in view (0/1)
zoom	camera distance, % (0 = first person, 100 = original view)		wtilt	weapon tilts with the view (0/1)
fov	field of view		wsize	weapon size, %
eye	eye height, cm		wfwd	weapon distance from eyes, cm
bob	head bob, %		wright	weapon to the right, cm
bloom	glow, % (−1 = game default)		wdown	weapon lower, cm
roofs	ceilings indoors (0/1)		recoil	recoil, %
crosshair	crosshair (0/1)		laser	laser sight (0/1)
radar	geometry on the radar (0/1)

Known limitations

• Aiming is horizontal, exactly as in the original game: you choose the direction, the game picks the height (it shoots level from chest height and auto-aims at targets). The vertical position of the crosshair does not steer shots, and standing right behind a railing can make shots hit it.
• Your own body is hidden. The weapon view model has no arms and no reload animation, and one position is used for all weapons, so bulky ones take up more of the screen.
• The world was built to be seen from above: distant scenery is less detailed at eye level, and rooms whose ceiling was never modelled stay open.
• The glow setting dims bloom for the whole picture, neon signs included. Very bright weapons still light up nearby fog.
• Geometry on the radar is a small live top-down render: dark in dark places, steam shows as white blobs, and it reduces the frame rate a little.
• When an interaction prompt is off screen for the game's own maths, the mod shows a plain text line with the same key and label instead of the game's styled prompt.
• The settings menu is keyboard-only.
• First person draws more of the world than the top-down camera, so expect a lower frame rate than in the unmodified game.
• Not every weapon type has been tried.

Troubleshooting

• The game crashes on the main menu or randomly in combat — check steps 2 and 3 of the installation.
• Mouse look does not work and a cursor is visible — a game menu is (or is believed to be) open. Press F5 twice; if it keeps happening in the same place, please report where.
• Nothing happens after loading — look at Mods\AscentFPS\AscentFPS.log and UE4SS.log next to the game executable.

Files

AscentFPS/
  enabled.txt          makes UE4SS load the mod
  Scripts/main.lua     bootstrap: log, hooks, console command
  Scripts/fps.lua      everything else

Created at runtime inside Mods\AscentFPS\: AscentFPS.cfg (settings) and AscentFPS.log.

Credits

• Built with an AI coding agent (Claude Code) and the universal-modder toolkit; tested in the game by a human player.
• RE-UE4SS by the UE4SS-RE team.
• The Ascent is © Neon Giant / Curve Games. This repository contains no game files or game assets.

License

MIT