First off, I’m completely new to modding… But I used to do 3D stuff in VRML (over a decade ago) and I’m trying to learn how to do it in Blender. Modding Founder’s Fortune seemed comparatively easy so I’m starting there (though I’ve tried to get the hang of some other games previously).
I mostly want to add decorative type items which seems to be doable, though I need to wrap my head around Unity to succeed… Anyway, I decided to start with changing a few of the cooking recipes. I’ve manged to make the mod work (and made another mod where all skills and research areas are unlocked to enable faster testing of mods), but I’m not sure I made it the most efficient way.
So, question one:
If I modify the kitchen recipes, do I have to include ALL the code describing the kitchen furniture object (and all recipes) to make it work? It seems there should be a “neater” and more exact way to single out a recipe or at least the “productionDescriptions” area, but I couldn’t manage. (Though, come to think of it, in my first attempts I had written “product” instead of “production”… so that might have been the issue, too…).
Second, I would have loved to add more food types and recipes but from what I understand this is not currently doable. I did see a list where making the addition of resources possible was number 2 of things to do - in 2019… Is this still something that will/might be done?
Oh and also… If I need to include all the kitchen code just to change one recipe, and then that mod is combined with another mod (say, by another player) that tries to change the items needed to build the kitchen, for instance, they’d be in conflict with each other, wouldn’t they?
(And for anyone curious, this is the few things I changed:
Fruit Salad - no wood needed as it isn’t cooked
Cheese - 2 milk instead of one, mainly because it takes huge amounts of milk to make cheese in real life (something like 10 to 1) and that milk isn’t used for much else anyway. Until you can make strawberry cake.
Beer - I replaced the pumpkins with 1 healing herb since you use herbs in beer and the doctor is supposedly the brewer so it seemed to make more sense than making pumpkin beer, to me.)
Adding objects (furniture) is fairly straight forward and it is described in the tutorials.
If you are making a Mod for testing, you can add:
“instantFurnitureMovement”: true,
“instantBuilding”: true,
and subscribe to Loikas Mod on Steam - “Creative Mode Everything for Free”
which when combined basically makes a Sandbox mode.
Q 1
Normally you just have to put in the changes that you want altered.
Descriptions have to be exactly the same as the original for the code to work.
Q2
Changing food requirements would involve writing scripts, so you would have to check out the games decompiled code. Daniel will probably let you know if it is easily done or not.
I think that if 2 mods are in conflict with an asset then the games default values would over ride - not too sure, the Dev’s might confirm either way.
If you need to chat or looking for ideas, pop over to FF/Dionic on Discord as there is usually someone listening:
Maybe I should have mentioned I’m not on Steam, and I also don’t care much for Discord, which is why I decided to join the community here Thanks for the “instant-tips” though, they might definitely speed things up when testing!
Small update: I finally got around to trying “furniture/brewery/productionDescriptions”: and it worked so I guess I must have only tried it back when I was misspelling things…
I’m still listing all four kitchen recipes though, even if I’m only altering two of them. Not sure if there’s a way to refer to only one recipe at a time, the way the code looks now?
Anyway, it works, and I’ve learned some more about Blender and Unity, although I did have some issues yesterday with the photoStudio bit (it seemed unresponsive - I couldn’t give a name or take a snapshot). Will see if I can sort that out, or I guess I’ll be back…
OK now I’m confused. Or dumb. Or both…
I thought I had gotten my adjusted recipes to work, but when playing a new game after the last changes I did, I realised it wasn’t working at all. No error messages, just no effect. So I checked it again and indeed found an error (seems I deleted a bit too much when trying to exclude everything that I hope isn’t necessary for the mod to work). Thing is, it’s still working in the first game I tested it and still NOT working in the most recent game. I have applied mods and restarted and they don’t have that red text message about mods possibly being incompatible. But they also don’t seem to actually update when I change the mod… So do I always have to start a brand new game to test a mod? I can’t recall having to start over and over until I made it work the first time…
Annoyingly this also means that I don’t know if the mod’s working, at all…
Another update - hope I’m not wearing you out!
I made some adjustments to my test mod and I can now verify that my recipes do indeed seem to be the way I want them. I made the kitchen super easy to build just to check that one thing in a new game but I also tried the instantBuilding & instantFurnitureMovement - unfortunately without effect. Oh well, I could still check my mod, so… Next I should get back to working on my Blender files
The update shouldn’t be causing any problems for your Mod (if you were wondering).
When you save a game it will create artifacts into that save which may not be available to a later game save. So it seems that you did something in your earlier Mod that you haven’t done in your current version.
If you have a copy of the earlier version Mod, try using that or make another version (a copy) of what you are using and try to rebuild that earlier version.
It is always handy to have a few versions of your Mod as you progress through the development phase, so you can fall back to a working version.
Being confused / dumb is normal for us mere mortals when working on code
Maybe a Dev has a different thought on your problem, but I know they are very busy atm…
Thanks Roo
For now it’s just the instantBuilding etc things that you suggested I’d try, that’s not working and it’s no big deal. But I think I might need to get in the habit of saving several versions of my files - something I’ve never been good at. I do manage it very occasionally when painting… Will have to try to remember it when writing these json files, too.
Thanks Roo