Interface
Optics
by The AshForge Team · v1.3.1
⬇ New
741 KB
Summary
Built because a player told us they couldn't comfortably read the game's panels. Optics scales the text everywhere the game draws it — no panel left behind — and while we were in there, it also unlocks the camera so you can get right down among your colonists instead of watching them from four storeys up. Two sliders, and both take effect the moment you confirm.
Details
• UI text size, 100%–200%. It scales the text the game itself draws, so it reaches every panel rather than a handful we remembered to patch.
• Camera zoom-in, 1.0×–8.0×. The game normally stops you about four pawn-heights above the ground. At 8× you're level with a colonist's chest — and the camera is stopped just above the surface, so it can never sink into the terrain.
• Both are sliders under ESC ▸ Mod Settings, and both apply immediately — no restart, no reload.
• Your settings live on your machine, not in your save, so they follow you from colony to colony.
Needs AshForge Tools for the settings screen.
Changelog ▾
v1.3.1October 8, 2026
- ChangedHarmony, the patching library this mod uses, now ships in its own folder. Another mod that brings a different copy of Harmony can no longer make the game reset your mod list because of this mod.
v1.3.0October 7, 2026
- ChangedWorks with the game's built-in mod manager: extract the archive into the game's Mods folder and enable it in the in-game Mods menu. Settings are shared between the two kinds of install. Installs through the AshForge Hub continue to work; if both are present, only one copy runs.
v1.2.0September 26, 2026
- ChangedUpdated for the current Ascent of Ashes (Steam build 25465256), the version everyone is on now that the game's beta has gone public. The previous release does not load on it.
v1.1.0July 24, 2026
- FixedThe text size slider only ever affected the game's own panels. Mods that style their own windows — Wealth & Trade, the AshForge Tools panel, the World Map — set their text size per widget, which overrode the game-wide setting, so their panels stayed the same size wherever you put the slider. They now scale with it.
- AddedOptics now publishes the chosen text size for other mods to read, so a mod can grow its whole layout — panel size, padding, row heights — to match, not just its lettering. Mods that use this ship alongside this release; others are unaffected, and none of this requires Optics to be installed.
v1.0.0July 12, 2026
- AddedFirst release. Bigger UI text, and a camera that can get close.