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[WOTC] Reduced Alien Weapon FX (v1.03)

Strips down various weapon particles to help with performance, particularly when using Idle Suppression or any mod that makes units fire their guns a lot.

Effects like these used to wreck FPS over time as the game has a sort of memory leak issue with them, but as of July 2nd 2021, Highlander Update v1.22 fixes this issue with a new particle management system.

However, the effects themselves can still drop FPS, sometimes severely. I'd notice the game freeze for a fraction of a second whenever an Andromedon would fire his gun for example, because of how intense the Beam weaponry effects are combined with the fact it's a shotgun - and that's one unit with one gun.

Even with my more than capable PC, Idle Suppression is a performance hog. Sure, you could just lower all of it's settings so it doesn't kill your FPS, but at that point, why even have the mod? Kind of silly when only a handful of units are firing at each other every 5 - 10 seconds or something.

So, i made these Reduced Weapon FX mods to help with this. I've done a performance test of these mods pre-Highlander v1.22 here, you can see how the test looked in the preview video up top.

In the test, we have 27 aliens of all types and 7 XCOM soldiers using all tiers of weaponry, all shooting at each other with maxed IS settings. Rocking a GTX 1070, an Intel i9-9900k and 16 GB of RAM was only enough to get an average FPS of around 24 with the vanilla FX.

After installing both my FX mods, i was running at about 34 FPS on average, a +10 FPS increase. Considering how extreme the conditions were, i'd say this is a hell of an improvement.

If you're operating on a lower spec PC or just want more FPS when using Idle Suppression or similar, this should give you a pretty healthy performance boost.


You can find the XCOM Weapon version of this mod here, but be warned - it's a LOT more conflict-heavy, as there's more mods out there that alter them in some way, unlike the Alien weapons. if you use XSkin, you'll want to avoid it altogether.

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-- The ADVENT Assault Rifle + Priest SMG
-- The Purifier's Flamethrower
-- The ADVENT MEC's Cannon
-- The Sectopod's Turret
-- All alien plasma weaponry
-- The Andromedon's Plasma Shotgun (this one EATS framerates, good lord)
-- The Archon's Pimp Cane
-- The Gatekeeper's Death Ray
-- The Chosen's Weapons (not the XCOM-usable versions)

This also fixes a bug with the Assassin's Shotgun being INCREDIBLY LOUD when fired. The FX Element playing the sound had a projectile count of 5, which effectively means the sound was being played at 5x the volume it should've been.

If you don't like how i toned down a particular weapon, you can remove it's entry in the XComWeaponSkinReplacer.ini file.

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-- If you're using another mod that replaces aspects of the alien weapons with their own edits (a different Weapon Skin Replacer config, a Template Master config, XSkin, etc.) this mod WILL cause conflicts if they try to replace the same parts this mod does.

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VERSION 1.03 (10/8/2025)
-- Added the Chosen's weapons.

-- Stripped down the FX in a few more places. Impact squibs i missed, ADVENT rifle trails, a few dynamic lights.

VERSION 1.02 (6/25/2021)
-- Further reduced the particle FX on the Plasma Weaponry's beams and the ADVENT Mag Weaponry's muzzle flashes, as well as the Gatekeeper's massive laser beam.

-- Removed some particle FX on the Sectopod's cannon animation.

-- Added reduced FX for the Plasma Weapon charge-up animations.

VERSION 1.01 (7/27/2020)
-- Added the ADVENT Purifier, ADVENT Priest and Spectre to the reduced FX list.

-- Fixed some typos in the XComWeaponSkinReplacer config.