13. The In-Game Overlay
Whenever a container screen is open — a chest, a furnace, an anvil, a shop menu, your own inventory — Redwire draws a set of floating windows over it. They let you work with the screen without leaving it, which matters because leaving it is often exactly what you are trying to avoid.
13.1 When it appears
The overlay shows on any container screen. It does not appear during normal play, on the main menu, or on Redwire’s own pages.
Three windows:
| Window | Where | When |
|---|---|---|
| PACKET QUEUE | Top left | While the Packet Interceptor is enabled, or whenever anything is queued |
| CHAT | Right edge, middle | Always |
| GUI TOOLS | Bottom right | Always |
Those are the starting positions — you can drag any of them anywhere.
How big they are is up to you: Overlay Scale in Settings → Appearance takes them from half size to double.
Item tooltips appear underneath these windows. If you would rather they appeared over the top, turn on Tooltips on top of overlay in Settings → Appearance.
13.2 Moving the windows
Drag a window by its title bar to move it anywhere on screen.
Positions are saved and restored the next time you launch the game, so you only arrange them once.
A window can never end up part-way off screen. Dragging one to an edge stops it there, and the same clamp is applied on the way in — so a position saved under a different Overlay Scale, or a different window size, cannot strand a title bar somewhere you can no longer grab it.
Each window’s contents move with it as one piece. They used to shimmer slightly during a drag, because every element inside was being snapped to the screen’s pixel grid on its own — the padding and the divider crossed a pixel boundary a moment apart from the frame around them.
Chat and GUI Tools move as a pair. Chat sits directly above the GUI Tools panel with a fixed gap, and the two together are anchored to the bottom-right corner. They keep that gap at every Overlay Scale. At 2× on a 1080p display the pair is taller than the screen, so they overlap — drag one aside, or use a smaller scale.
13.3 The Packet Queue window
A live list of packets the Packet Interceptor is holding, so you can watch them arrive while the container is open.
View Queue opens Redwire on the Packet Tools page, already on the Interceptor tab.
This window is hidden when the interceptor is off and the queue is empty — there would be nothing in it. Switching the interceptor off does not hide it: everything it already caught is still held, and the window listing those (with the button that gets you to them) is exactly what you want at that moment.
13.4 The Chat window
A chat box you can type into without closing the container.
Type a message and press Enter to send it. Anything starting with / runs as a command.
Normally opening chat means closing whatever screen you had open. This does not.
13.5 The GUI Tools window
The most useful of the three. It shows three live values about the open screen, then eight buttons.
The three values
| Value | What it means |
|---|---|
| Revision ID | A counter the server increases every time the container’s contents change. Watching it move tells you the server is still updating this screen |
| Sync ID | The number the server and your client use to refer to this particular open screen. Every screen you open gets a new one |
| Slot | The slot number your cursor is over |
The Slot readout keeps the last slot you hovered rather than blanking when you move away. That is deliberate — you have to move the cursor off the slot to reach anything in this window, so a readout that cleared would be unreadable by the time you looked at it.
This is the easiest way to find slot numbers for the Scripts GUI blocks: hover the slot, read the number.
GUI Control
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| De-sync | Tells the server the screen closed while keeping it open on your end |
| Close w/o Packet | Closes the screen on your end without telling the server |
| Save GUI | Remembers the current screen and its contents |
| Load GUI | Puts that saved screen back on your display |
These four are worth understanding properly, because they are two halves of the same idea.
A container screen exists in two places at once: the server has its version, your client has its own. Normally they are kept in step. These buttons break that link, in opposite directions:
- De-sync ends it on the server’s side. The server thinks you closed the chest; you are still looking at it. You are now holding a screen the server has stopped tracking.
- Close w/o Packet ends it on your side. You are back in the world; the server thinks you are still standing at the chest with it open.
- Save GUI and Load GUI let you take a snapshot of a screen and put it back on your display later — including after it should have gone.
What is on screen after a de-sync is a picture, not a chest. The server has stopped tracking it. Clicking in it sends clicks about a screen the server no longer believes in, which servers handle in very different ways — some ignore them, some correct you, some flag it. This is a tool for understanding how a server handles inventory synchronisation, not a way to duplicate items.
Interceptor controls
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flush Queue | Sends every held packet at once |
| Start / Stop | Turns the Packet Interceptor on or off |
| Clear Queue | Throws the queue away — nothing is sent |
| Disc & Flush | Sends the queue and disconnects from the server in one action |
Disc & Flush flushes first and disconnects immediately after, so the packets go out but nothing that arrives back is ever processed by your client.
13.6 Doing all this from the keyboard
Every GUI Tools button also exists as a keybind in Settings → Keybinds, so you can trigger them without moving your cursor off what you are doing:
- De-sync GUI
- Save GUI
- Load GUI
- Close GUI Without Packet
- Flush Packet Queue
- Clear Packet Queue
- Toggle Packet Interceptor
- Disconnect and Flush
See Keybinds.
13.7 Redwire over a container
Pressing Right Shift while a container is open opens the full Redwire interface on top of it — the container stays open underneath rather than closing. Closing Redwire puts you back at the container exactly as you left it.
That is why the overlay and the main interface work together: you can go and edit a queued packet on the Packet Tools page and come straight back to the chest.