I don't get why NOBODY that knows how to make mods for this game (including the devs) are making UP-TO-DATE tutorials on this subject. I love playing starbound. In the beginning (steam early release day) it was a bit boring and you could rush through the game. Now it's nice and fun to play and it's worth my time to make mods for it. All tutorials about starbound modding is mostly (almost all) outdated or they are stupidly useless youtube videos that do not go indepth or use no-voice tutorials. I mean really! Is there nobody that can spend his/her time to spread the knowledge of modding for starbound? I want to be able to learn to mod for starbound, like: - making custom Guns with custom sounds, looks, stats and different Alt-abilities. - making custom melee weapons with custom sounds, looks, stats and different Alt-abilities. - able to make new loot chest with a special list of randomized loot. - new ships, races, furniture, craftingstations, mechs etc. - new teleportation animations. - new dungeons and bossfights. - new special tech like: Cloaking, Throwing a mobile turret to aid you (think axton from borderlands 2), able to deplay a shield wall, target scanner (highlight all monsters drawn on screen) etc. and many many MANY more! Either somebody needs to show some love for this game and breath life back into the modding community, by making new up-to-date modding tutorials OR the devs need to make modding tools for Starbound so people have an easy entry into the modding part of starbound. They could make Weapon Creator Tools that give full control (in a visual way) over the stats, look and handling of weapons (with alt-abilities). They could make a Racial Creator Tool that does the same thing as the WCT but for new races. I find it very frustrating that I love a game so much, that I want to make mods for it but I can't because there are no places that teaches you everything you need to know to make it.... Modding is a great way for devs to keep life in their games. mod creators like to make stuff for free and see their mod popularity grow and the devs are happy because they essentially get free content for their game and people keep buying their game. This doesn't work if new people/modders do not know where to begin. We need info! I just wanted this off my chest... Community seems dead (in regards to modding and sharing info) and the devs are not helping it improve either. They took way to long with their pre-release/alpha phase because people have seen the game, played the game and moved on already....
First, modding is a practice people get into of free-will, Chucklefish and/or those who practice it are under no obligation to provide simplistic tutorials for other. Second, despite me saying such, several people are creating new threads on specific fields of modding within Starbound... The | Suit's Video Series: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/the-suits-tutorial-video-series.113389/ The Unofficial Modding EBook: http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/unofficial-modding-ebook.2930/ The | Suit's Basic Patching: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/basic-patching-now-with-path-guide-v1-9.84496/ Unpacking/ Packing .pak Files: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/how-to-successfully-pack-and-unpack-pak-files.66649/ (These are only the most recent/relevant ones I have bookmarked for myself.) And always, always, always check the "Modding Guides" sticky. Despite popular belief, its content is still highly relevant to current Starbound, otherwise it still wouldn't be there. Besides these, most other "outdated" tutorials are highly relevant for what someone needs to get started in modding for this game. The steps may be different in newer version/updates, however, the concepts behind what files do what and how you can change them haven't changed much. Third, if someone is like me, and cannot get behind the idea of full-text/video guides, the modding repo has no control over you if you want to download a mod, rip it apart, and analyze it to see how it works. (This is how I've learned to both program and mod for SEVERAL games.) Please don't take only a small portion of time to look in a pond of information whereas there is an ocean of resources at your disposal. Modding isn't something you can pick up in only one or two tutorials or even a couple videos, its something like a trade that takes time, dedication, and effort to achieve. I hope I've helped. -Inf_Wolf14
The only way I learn modding is reverse engineering and fixing old mods. My first mod was updating a race mod from furious koala. Modding is in essence, learning what to not do one game crash at a time.
Hmmm, you seem to talk to me like I'm young, stupid or new to modding. I think this is just my quick interpertation of your post, but I could be wrong. Let's me clarify that I know the process of modding things for games. I have made big (and small) mods for several games like : Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Fallout 4, Doom (2016), Xcom, unreal tournament and some others. Every game, where the developers decided to support modding, have given us several ways to learn how to make mods for their games. Every game has to be modded differently and therefor modding for each new game is a new learning process. If it happens to use a method that you alredy know, then thats great! you can start right away, but not everyone knows all methods. Games like fallout or Elder Scrolls have a Modding tool that lets you make mods. there are hundreds youtube videos that teach you every aspect of modding for those games. you then also have the WIKI and some modding documentation made by bethesda themselves. I believe that IF a company/studio decides to implement modding, that they DO have an obligation to give SOME documentation (that is relevant to the current version) so that the modding community can actually building from that. You can't say; well, we will have modding, you will be able to make anything you want for the game BUT if you want to learn how to mod for our game then your shit out of luck! Anyway, last two things I wanted to say are: 1: I did not start this thread (or this reply) to start a argument or to start bitch fighting. I just wanted some people who have the knowledge how to mod (for starbound) to recognise that there is indeed a shortage in documentations and guides. Maybe the experienced people could bring back more UP-TO_DATE life into modding. You can't say that most posts and vids are from 2014/2015 and are a least 1 year old and are about an older Starbound version. 2: I do not expect that someone is going to teach me everything step by step without any effort from my part. If that is what you meant, then it's not the case. If I could get my hands on guides or vids that talk about a majority of the complicated stuff, then I could figure the rest on my own. Just looking at already created mods will not give you everything you need to start modding. There are plenty of mods out that are outdated (more then 90%) and their structure is therefor useless to learn from. There are also mods out that are updated but even they lack certain features in their mods that are possible to add. Example: a weapon mod that adds new weapons. You could look into the mod to learn how you make your own. The example mod however does not use the "classMultiplier": entry that manages the energy usage of the gun. I had to learn about THAT by going through 10 vids, 5 "guides" and 3 mods.... That is what I'm trying to say: you have to go though alot of old junk, incomplete mods etc. to find the parts you want.. IMHO it would be greaet to have a place where you can find updated guides and documentation about modding in Starbound. If people know how to mod and are experienced in this, then please consider to create guides for other (newer) Starbound modders. That's all!
I've been trying to update an outdated mod to work on the current build of the game for the last ten hours or so but it says "(MapException): Key 'raccoon' not found in Maps::get()". However when I search all files in the Starbound game, having the computer index all the contents, "Maps:get()" doesn't fucking show up ANYWHERE. It doesn't exist. I was able to fix a previous problem by adding a missing line to the ai.config.patch file because it was missing "portraitFrames". I can search "portraitFrames" in the Starbound files and find the original ai.config but not the other? And for some fucking reason the crash log doesn't say what file is causing the error or what directory has the bad file. I've been sitting here just removing shit and replacing shit and nothing is working.
The problem is you are taking quite a few things for granted. A lot of things you request require programming experience. The first question you should ask your self is are you fluent in Lua? If not custom abilities are out of the question, infact most of them are out of the question. The rest of modding deals with JSON - if you took the time to read my Ebook it covers all the basics for designing basic elements. The most advanced parts - require a thorough knowledge of Lua - and people who generally have it can quickly pick up the relevant parts as it is fairly straight forward. Avoid trying to update an old mod. Unless you know how to make a mod - for the current version - there is no practical way to update it. Always start from making something simple and from the ground up. Also tools are generally designed from tools which exist to developers. As they don't use special tools, and it is ridiculously simple to do without them. It really is a waste of time designing them. As suggested above - start with my tutorial series or Ebook an you should be able to pick up the rest reasonably fast on your own.
Modding, like anything, is learns with experience mostly. I started with zero knowledge of what the hell to do. I learned by stating with simple things, looking at comparable vanilla assets, and tweaking them. Over time you get a feel for the structure and are able to manipulate it more. You need to break things down and understand how they work, otherwise you will get nowhere with a guide alone. Yeah, the amount of general support with tutorials is lacking, but that doesn't prevent anyone from picking up modding. Where there isn't a guide, there are the forums for asking questions. I don't write up tutorials, because quite frankly, I suck at it. I am terrible at explaining things, let alone trying to do it in text form.
The Suit said all that can be said on the topic, and he did it pretty well. One thing to keep in mind, however, is not overreact when people seem like they're talking to you like you have no prior experience. The truth is, most people who come to modding forums are new to modding, and even then, coming from other games does not provide enough experience for the destination game. The only thing modding other games would help with is experience with moving and storing files in such a way they don't get lost into the abyss of a HDD. Like with me, I'm clueless when I came to this game. I have plenty of experience of modding other games as well, but the games are so vastly different from each other absolutely nothing carried over except Blender and Notepad++. Battlefield 1942 is object orientated in its own language, so the code there goes nowhere. Spintires uses XML, which is probably in other places, but it's specific to ST's custom game engine. I had to spend quite a long time playing around with Starbound's JASON files to get the hang of them, play around with them a bit, and I can (semi)confidently say I understand how the game is structured. I also know Starbound is very picky about syntax, I'm used to Spintires where I could forget an entire ending tag and the vehicle still load. So, TL;DR, unpack the game, tweak sprites, tweak code, crash the game (a lot), speak 4-letter programming language, just like learning to mod every other game. A guide can only go so far, digging into assets is a fantastic way to learn. Sorry if this was a bit off topic.
Starbound doesn't use any weird file formats so you don't really need any special tools to mod Starbound. Of course everything can be make easier but it is pretty easy already. (Did you know you can click the prefix in the top of the forums to look for Tools or Tutorials?) There's just one thing that is harder and that's maps/dungeons. I know someone was working on something for Tiled http://www.mapeditor.org/ , I just can't remember if it was the devs or community. I'm sure I saw it somewhere (forums or reddit). They do support modding and we used to have API documentation but it was pulled for the time being as it was getting outdated. They are going to get it out, they just can't say when. Read metadept's reply on this https://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/4ducqx/when_will_chucklefish_rerelease_the_modding_api/ You can also find a lot of information on the API in /scripts/api/ and on http://sblaud.net or http://starbounder.org. Don't be afraid to test and break things to learn Right now Stable/Unstable and Nightly differ so it is easier to wait for 1.0 before writing any documentation or tutorials. A positive side to being so close to 1.0 is that the game isn't changing as much now as it used to. If you have trouble figuring out what something does or affects in the files then here's what I usually do to figure it out (in no particular order) Grep tool and search similar things for context Google, reddit, or forum search with just the property/function name. Be sure to add "starbound" on google. Make a new post on the forums.
