Unofficial quality of life modifications for the PC version of the hit video game Muse Dash using MelonLoader.
- These mods are unofficial and are not associated with, related to, and/or endorsed by peropero, hasuhasu, and/or XD.
- USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. NO WARRANTIES.
- Please read FAQ and have a look at known issues.
This repo currently contains the following mods. They can be used in any combination.
- Scoreboard characters — shows character/elfin info on the scoreboard
- True rank — changes "999+" in the scoreboard to an actual rank
- Album scroll — enables to scroll through current album using Shift keys
- Song info — shows song's BPM and duration
- UI tweaks — tweaks the UI in various small ways
Mod file: ScoreboardCharacters.dll, also requires UserLibs DLLs
This mod adds buttons to show character and elfin used to obtain the score to the in-game scoreboard:
These buttons can be clicked, and will set your current character and elfin to these on the button. It will even scroll the selection screens for you.
If you don't like the provided default images on the buttons or the way they are scaled on your screen resolution, an override spritesheet can be provided to the mod to display.
Details
The overriding is designed to not apply any scaling to the images, and the sprites will be placed to the buttons as is.
Image preparation
A good way to start with an override is to use the default spritesheet for your resolution as a template. The defaults are located in ScoreboardCharacters/Resources folder. There's also a bigger source and/or reference image in ScoreboardCharacters/etc.
If there is no default image for your desired resolution, the source/reference can be scaled to form a template. The rest of this section describes the requirements the override image must meet; see "Image override" for the way to enable the override image.
Sprite size
First, pick a size for individual sprites. It's best to use the size that matches the button size for your screen resolution. As a baseline, 〇×1080 resolution uses 40 px sprites. Scale this for your resolution.
For example, 2560×1440 screen size will work best with
Spritesheet resolution
The spritesheet must have 8 sprites (5 characters, 3 elfins) per row — its width should be 8 times the width of a single sprite. The height must also be divisible by the sprite size, as the sprites are square.
There should be enough rows to cover all existing characters and elfins; for now, an 8×8 grid will suffice, as shown by default spritesheets.
Continuing the example, the size of custom spritesheet for 2560×1440 should be:
- width:
$8 \times 53 = 424$ px - height:
$8 \times 53 = 424$ px
Sprites placement
Use the reference image to place the sprites on the spritesheet. The sprites with numbers on them are placeholders for possible future updates, it's not mandatory to fill them in an override.
Image override
To apply the override, place your custom spritesheet as scoreboard_characters_override.png to MuseDash_Data directory of the game install. You'll see a warning in the console if its dimensions differ from expected values. If you don't see your custom images in the game and there's nothing in the console, double-check the file name and location.
Mod file: TrueAbove1kRank.dll
This small mod changes mysterious "999+" text in your own scoreboard entry to your actual rank if it lies within 1000–2000 range:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Note
The game servers only track top 2000 entries. If you score less, there's nothing this mod can do.
Mod file: AlbumScroll.dll
This mod adds an option to quickly scroll to the next album in the song selection menu. Just hold Shift key while scrolling (A/D, ←/→, mouse wheel, on-screen buttons — works with all of these). This will scroll to the closest song from a different album.
Here's a little demo of switching entire albums by single Shift+Arrow key taps:
albumscroll_demo_480.mp4
Tip
It's best to use single taps to scroll albums.
This mod does not play well with "hold to scroll" feature. It might skip an album if a direction key is held long enough to trigger continuous scrolling mode.
Mod file: SongInfo.dll
This mod adds song's BPM and duration display to the song info screen:
| State | Illustration |
|---|---|
| Before |  |
| After |  |
Note
The duration is approximate (defined as "the duration of the actual music file used") and does not include the "Music-Ready-Go!" intro. The "Full combo" outro seems to be included though.
For technical reasons, it is possible to replace the song duration with an arbitrary string. Why though?
This mod uses an external file to store the lengths of the songs obtained locally from the game data. This happens when new songs are added to the game and the mod's built-in database becomes outdated. Usually, direct access to game data is avoided because it's a relatively slow operation that slightly lags the game. When it's done, the results are saved for reuse.
The file, song_info_override.json, is stored in MuseDash_Data directory of the game install. If there are no overrides to store, the file will not be present.
After a mod update, local overrides are automatically removed from the file if they match with the updated built-in data. The file itself is removed if no overrides remain.
However, the mod currently does not remove overrides that do not match its own data. Therefore, it's possible to store arbitrary strings in there, and the mod will display these as song duration.
The file itself is a simple string to string JSON dictionary:
- the key is a song's so called
uid; a string in{album id}-{song id}format - the value is the string to display; supposed to be the song's length in
mm:ssformat
For instance, if the cache file contains:
{
"8-1": "O-oooooooooo AAAAE-A-A-I-A-U- JO-oooooooooooo AAE-O-A-A-U-U-A- E-eee-ee-eee AAAAE-A-E-I-E-A-JO-ooo-oo-oo-oo EEEEO-A-AAA-AAAA"
}Then, data for Brain Power will look like this (clipped for file size reasons):
Yes, the field is set up for scrolling longer strings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
To revert to the default display, just remove the entry from the overrides file, ot the file itself.
If song_info_override.json does not contain valid JSON in expected format, a warning will be displayed at startup. The file will get overwritten by mod if it encounters a song it doesn't have data for — it will be stored in the file.
Mod file: UITweaks.dll
This mod is a collection of various cosmetic changes to the game UI that fix a particular "I can't unsee this (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻" issue. They are bundled together only to keep the mod count manageable; each feature can be toggled on and off independently of others.
The following UI tweaks are currently available:
This feature widens the space for the song's album name on the song selection screen, so wider names fit without scrolling:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Note
This feature is intended to be used with English locale.
List of affected albums (in no particular order)
- [Happy Otaku Pack]s Vol.10 and beyond
- [Give Up TREATMENT] packs, all volumes
- [Legends of Muse Warriors]
- [COSMIC RADIO PEROLIST]
- [CHUNITHM COURSE MUSE]
- [Let's Do Bad Things Together]
- [Budget Is Burning: Nano Core]
- [maimai DX Limited-time Suite]
- [MD-level Tactical Training Blu-ray]
This feature synchronizes the spinning award achievement icons on song info screen. By default, these easily go out of sync:
(achievements header modified by Song info)
Before:
cups-before.mp4
After:
cups-after.mp4
The difference is clearly seen on last frames of both videos.
Why does it get out of sync in the first place?
The icons are reused between difficulty levels on this screen: the icon for the first achievement is shared between all three difficulty levels; the icon for the second achievement is shared between Hard and Master difficulty levels. By default, whenever the icon appears on the screen, its animation starts from beginning. Other icons may keep their animation state from another difficulty level.
This mod feature corrects this by matching the state of new icons to the state of previously active icons (if any) on difficulty level switches.
This feature syncs the "bubble flow" animation between HP and Fever bars:
| State | Illustration |
|---|---|
| Before |  |
| After |  |
| After* |  |
(please forgive the compression artifacts, the bars look better in-game)
Note
This does not include the Touhou danmaku mode, as a different texture for Fever Spell bar is used.
In Bad Apple!!'s black-and-white mode the bubbles are invisible on the Fever bar, so the mod's effect is not noticeable.
P E R O P E R O兄✰貴✰乱✰舞 has no visible UI.
By default, Fever bar's texture is modified to match the default HP bar's one. If SyncHpFeverAnimAlt is set to true, the reverse will be done: HP bar's texture will be modified instead. This is purely cosmetic.
This mod's prefereneces are used to toggle the mods. In addition, the alternative mode for HP/Fever sync has its own toggle.
The preferences are stored in MelonLoader's default preferences file, UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg (relative to game's root directory). Launching the game with the mod installed should create the following section in the file:
[Bnfour_UITweaks]
# Enables wider album titles on song selection screen.
WiderAlbumTitles = true
# Syncs the spinning cup images for song achievements.
AchievementIconsSync = true
# Syncs the bubble animation for HP and Fever bars.
SyncHpFeverAnim = true
# Syncs HP bar to Fever bar.
SyncHpFeverAnimAlt = falseBy default, all toggleable features are enabled. Set a relevant value to false to disable a feature.
Tip
The mod will notify you when all its features are disabled, and it does nothing.
This is not a mod intended for using. Rather, it's a developmental test bed for me to test random stuff without disruption to existing proper mods. For instance, Album scroll and UI tweaks mods were first implemented (in a very scuffed way; no, I won't show the code ⇀‸↼‶) here and then moved to their own permanent projects.
The project (as published) contains the bare minimum for a mod that is successfully loaded; it does nothing except posting a single message in the log.
These are MelonLoader mods. In order to run these, you need to have it installed. Currently, 0.6.1 Open-Beta of MelonLoader is supported.
Once you have MelonLoader installed, drop the DLLs of desired mods into the Mods folder. Remove to uninstall.
Important
Scoreboard characters mod also requires SkiaSharp libraries (libSkiaSharp.dll, SkiaSharp.dll) to be placed in UserLibs folder. These libraries are included in the download.
Rather than downloading the mods, I suggest (reviewing the source and) building them yourself — this way you'll be sure the mods behave as described. See "Building from source".
Otherwise, please verify the downloads.
Every published release is accompanied with SHA256 hashes of every DLL. MelonLoader does print these in console when loading mods, but I suggest to verify the hashes before installation.
(or, more accurately, "I thought you may want to know this")
tl;dr: no
The scoreboard mods show the information the game already receives directly from its API, it's just not shown anywhere by default. You can already get this info, for instance, from musedash.moe scoreboard. In fact, this repo is born from my frustration of having to mirror my track selection in-game to the website on another display. The Album scroll mod only affects the song selection menu. The Song info mod is simply displaying the data from game, too. All UI tweaks are purely cosmetic. All mods provide no gameplay advantage.
You still have to git gud to earn high scores.
Unless you count any changes to the game for any purpose as cheating, this is not cheating.
tl;dr: probably not, but NO WARRANTIES; USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
As I stated in previous question, I don't believe this is cheating. I've been using these continiously, and my account is still there. But there's a reason for the all-caps section of the license about having no warranties: the devs might think otherwise or break the compatibility (un)intentionally.
Remember that you're using the mods at your own risk. I have warned you many times in this readme.
tl;dr: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The mods are pretty much self-contained, so I think ("think" being the operative word here) they will work with other mods, unless those other mods change the vanilla code too much.
tl;dr: uninstall, and remember: NO WARRANTIES
If you just want to play the game, removing the mods (and maybe the modloader itself) is always an option.
- Please make sure you're using supported (0.6.1) version of MelonLoader.
- Try to remove mods not from this repo.
- Try to remove mods and/or modloader and check whether the vanilla game is broken too.
If none of these helps, feel free to submit an issue, unless the problem was already reported.
This repo is a run-of-the-mill .NET solution targeting .NET 6.
The only gotcha is that some libraries required to build it are not included because of file size (and licensing) issues. Your installation of MelonLoader will generate them for you.
Copy everything from MelonLoader/Managed, MelonLoader/Il2CppAssemblies, and MelonLoader/net6 folders from the game install to the references folder of this repo. All the DLLs should be directly in the references folder, no subfolders.
This should cover the local references for all the projects. (Actually, most of the DLLs are not necessary to build the solution, I just don't plan on keeping an accurate and up to date list of required libraries.)
After that, just run dotnet build.
Scoreboard characters mod uses SkiaSharp library (GitHub, main package NuGet, used native libs NuGet) for image editing. Its DLLs (SkiaSharp.dll, libSkiaSharp.dll) should be placed in UserLibs folder of the modded game install. SkiaSharp is MIT-licensed, and I include these in downloads for convenience.
If you want to get these straight from NuGet instead, you can use dotnet publish command:
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --no-self-contained ScoreboardCharacters/ScoreboardCharacters.csprojThe SkiaSharp DLLs will be in ScoreboardCharacters/bin/Release/net6.0/win-x64/publish folder.
Why win-x64 runtime? There is no native Muse Dash version for GNU/Linux, and I run the game via Proton, so the Windows binaries should work on both Windows and GNU/Linux for the time being. Mac? No idea.
You can also extract the DLLs from the nupkg files manually. Remember to look for net6.0 and win-x64 monikers.