Last week, Valve chose their absolute most favourite announcement time – Friday evening, after we all go home – to release the Steam Frame’s CAD files to the world. In short, this lets anyone with a 3D printer or a lathe or an injection moulder (etcetera) take the VR headset’s official blueprints and use them to make cool stuff for it. Non-commercially, of course.

Even before this great declassifying, though, it seems some lucky first-wave Frame recipients were already putting their own headsets on the line to prototype homemade gadgets and accessories. Some are sensibly practical. Some look inventive, if janky. At least one of them is a melting skull. All of them, I salute, as standard bearers of this open, occasionally unhinged thing we call PC gaming.

Not that all, or even most Steam Frame maker projects are the kind that would have you fake-smiling and backwards-walking out of their workshop. I love the simple concept of Boneyard Lab’s back-mounted power bank holder, something that directly addresses the acute Frame weakness of its brief battery life, and doesn’t add weight to the main unit like its head-mounted alternatives. Anyone who’s baulked at the £59 price tag on the Ergonomic Accessories Kit, the only ‘official’ way to upgrade the Frame controllers’ straps, may also with to peruse the many HackStrap variants that makers been tailoring; if I had the fabrication means, I’d go for Wrathernaut’s ergo straps, for that stylishly industrial JCB aesthetic.

I’m a bit iffier on the idea of 3D-printed light blocker extensions, like this and this, just on the grounds that anything less than a top-of-the-line printer will produce components with the texture of a tiny, extremely fine washboard. Not the kind of material you’d want rubbing on your nose, even if it does defeat the tyranny of the sun. Let us not entirely dismiss the offbeat, though, for there’s something almost guiltily appealing about Save-The-Baja’s Frame controller chest rig. This surely has no applicable function in VR games, even ones like Gunman Contracts that let you reload pistols by gorilla-beating a hand into your torso, and the project’s own description is brutally honest about its loose grip and sharp edges. God help me, though, I want one, if only to repeatedly unholster and re-holster the controllers while spinning them around like a shitty Ocelot.

Rounding out my biggest curiosity-piquers are this webby front cover by Lorenzocolu, which affords a few mils of barrier against scrapes and scratches (while leaving the onboard cameras unblocked), and Ikaros473’s gamepad coupler, which performs a conjoining operation on the Frame’s controllers. Handy, I’d imagine, for taking advantage of the Frame’s ability to run flat Steam games, or just if you’ve spaffed your entire life savings on the £889 Frame and can’t afford a proper Steam Controller.

I feel like I’m missing so- oh, right, the skull. Look at it! Exactly the kind of thing that would ensure any future dinner party invitations you send are permanently ghosted, and yet also, a functional, convenient stand and display for your expensive VR headset. I like it. I’d never have one, but I like it.

Also, this is a cracker of a patch note from creator schnurrri: “As requested, I created and added a second profile that includes two chambers to bury the controllers, including the hand straps, inside the skull.” As requested, I put holes in the skull. Makers of the world, please keep at it.