Floating Damage Numbers (ESPless) Mod

I thought this mod would be easy. It wasn't.

Damage numbers float above the heads of characters (including the player and companions) when taking damage or healing.

Highly configurable via the supplied MCM and ini.

This mod basically scans actors in the area, checks their health delta and shows a difference. It also handles hit events and explosion events. Colours changes for healing or damage, as well as critical hits.

It only shows damage inflicted by the player, on the player or by their teammates (the last one can be turned off).

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Recent Updates (Oct 2025):

I've made some changes since the initial release:

1. Flavor Text - Damage numbers can now show random text for special events (kills, crits, cripples, sneak attacks). There are quite a few variations for each type in the INI. You can turn them off.
2. Kill Confirmation - Killing blows get a pulse effect where the numbers flash between colors. The size multiplier is configurable.
3. Damage-Based Scaling - Font size can scale based on damage amount. Supports linear or square root scaling with level-based thresholds. It's disabled by default.
4. Position Offsets - The X/Y position settings didn't actually do anything before. They work now. You can adjust where numbers appear relative to the target's position.
5. System Rewrite - Rewrote the panel system to use XML traits properly, which made everything more stable and easier to extend.

The flavor text has things like "OBLITERATED!" and "BONE-BREAKER!" in it. It's silly and borderlands-y but you can configure it yourself in the ini file! Add new words, go mad!

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I've set the defaults to something I feel is sensible but you can change the font, size, colour and most other things in the ini. Currently the numbers have a slight element of randomness to their position, as I found this pleasing on the eye.

Animation Styles:

Look, I spent way too much time on this, but the mod now supports six different animation modes. Initially I was happy with the classic floating numbers, but then I got a bit carried away and before I knew it I had implemented a whole physics system.

1. Classic (Rise and Fade) - Numbers float up and fade away. Simple, clean, does the job.
2. Arc (Parabolic) - Numbers fly out in a parabolic trajectory, like they got shot out of the target.
3. Bounce (Gravity) - Numbers fall and bounce on an invisible floor, losing energy with each bounce until they peter out.
4. Spiral (Circular) - Numbers swirl upward in a helix pattern. Looks pretty cool with multiple hits.
5. Fountain (Water-like) - Numbers spill out like water, arcing up and falling back down with some randomness.
6. Matrix (Rain) - Numbers fall downward like digital rain. You can even give them a green tint if you want the full experience. This one sucks tbh.

Each mode has its own settings in the INI that you can tweak endlessly. Arc mode's spread and height, Bounce mode's damping coefficient, Spiral's rotation speed - honestly I probably went overboard with the options but I figured if someone's as particular about their floating damage numbers as I apparently am, they'd appreciate it.

The default is Classic because it's the least distracting, but personally I've been running with Fountain, it's just so ... distracting!

Technical & Performance

Thanks to Wall for sharing the tools to profile FNV. When I developed this, it was a huge piece of shit performance-wise. I was able to rewrite it a lot to make the panels draw more quickly (or rather, more lazy-loading, JIT-style). This is fairly common with UI projects since they operate on XML (that's how FNV UI works, in basic terms) and parsing it can be slow if you try and load it up-front.

TLDR: my benchmarks showed negligible performance impacts. Feel free to DM me @intotherough on discord if you find otherwise. Every day is a school day

Credits

I did use this mod to learn how to do some of the UI stuff but by the time I was done, not much was left. It's an awesome mod, and if you want an ESP version then you should 100% use it!