Natural Selection Wiki
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Natural Selection Wiki
MAC This article is currently under construction.


Introduction

Crosshairs are graphics shown in the center of the screen to assist with aim. They can be scaled up and down in the Advanced Options under Crosshair. To customize them, a Mod from the Steam Workshop is required.

Making your own Crosshair

Making your own Crosshair Mod is probably one of the easiest Mods to make. All you need is an image editor like Gimp or Photoshop and some imagination and skill (or a good crosshair to copy). Everything else comes with Natural Selection 2 itself.
There is another text tutorial by DCDarkling over on the ENSL website.

Step one: Crating the files

Navigate to your ui folder Steam\steamapps\common\Natural Selection 2\ns2\ui and locate the two files crosshairs.dds and crosshairs-hit.dds. Copy them to a location of your choosing and open them with your image editor. Both files are 64x1024 Pixels large and have 16 different Crosshairs of 64x64 Pixels each, most of which are unused.
crosshairs.dds is the Crosshair you see, crosshairs-hit.dds is the hitmarker that is displayed on top of the Crosshair whenever you hit something. If you don't want your Crosshair to have a hitmarker, make crosshairs-hit.dds empty or the same as crosshairs.dds. In this article the crosshairs are numbered top to bottom 1-16.
Now edit both files to your heart's content. The next step is to create a Mod for your Crosshair and publish it to Steam.

Vanilla Crosshairs
Crosshair: Used for:
1 Rifle, HMG
2 Pistol
3 Empty
4 Shotgun
5 Currently not in use
6 Grenade Launcher, Flamethrower
7 Parasite, Bile Bomb, Lerk
8 Spit, Babbler Bait
9 Axe, Welder, Mine, Hand Grenades, Exosuits, Skulk Bite, Xenocide, Fade, Onos


Step two: Creating a Mod

Navigate to your Natural Selection 2 Steam folder Steam\steamapps\common\Natural Selection 2 and launch LaunchPad.exe. Make sure that Steam is running and you are logged in before launching it. Under no circumstance should you start the LaunchPad.exe from the x64 folder.

  • Step 1: Create a new Mod by clicking on New.
  • Step 2: Select a Path for the Mod and a Name to be displayed on the Steam Workshop.
  • Step 3: Open the Output folder on the left and create a folder ui and copy your files into the folder.
  • Step 4: Under Configure you can edit the Name, add a description and give additional information.
  • Step 5: Publish the Mod to Steam (visibility can only be public but can be changed in the Steam Workshop afterwards.
  • Optionally you can replace preview.jpg in the Mod's folder with any 512x512 Pixel jpg to be the picture shown for your mod in the Workshop.
    File location:

    Put your files in ui


    Final step: Using your Mod

    Use your Steam client to navigate to the Workshop. You should find a section called Your Workshop Files with a little drop down menu. Selecting it should bring up your published files. Find your Crosshair, subscribe to it, launch Natural Selection 2, activate the Mod in the Mod Menu and restart. Now you should have your own custom made Crosshair.

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