Modding Tutorial: Basic Overview + Making your first example mod

Founders' Fortune FF Mods
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Basic Overview

Founders’ Fortune can be modded in three big ways requiring different types of skills:

1. Overriding the values that are currently in the game

You can write simple patch.json files in order to change a lot of the parameters of the game.
Any motivated player can make this kind of mods. All it takes is looking through the game’s files and changing the parameters you want to change.

2. Adding new content (furniture, equipment, etc.) to the game

You will be making 3D models and configuring their settings in their own .json files.
These kinds of mods may require some 3D art knowledge, depending on what kind of objects you’d like to add to the game.

3. Changing the gameplay through C# scripting

This is the most powerful type of mod and can change the gameplay fundamentally. There are virtually no limits on what you can do, though some things are easier than others.
This type of mod requires real programming. You will be interacting with Founders’ Fortune and Unity C# code and use in-game debugging tools to achieve your goals.

Mods install location

There are 2 places mods can be placed in.

Self-made mods and manual installs

The base mods directory is located in

C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\LocalLow\Oachkatzlschowaf Interactive\Founders Fortune\mods

Each folder within the mods directory belongs to a different mod. This is how you can manually install mods and this is where you will start making your own mods.

Steam Workshop Downloads

When mods are downloaded from the Steam workshop, they usually placed somewhere within the Steam folder, for example in steamapps\workshop\content\1104330\. This location is mostly relevant for automatic mod downloads when you subscribe to a mod in the workshop.

Simple Example Mod from the Devs

If you want, you can jump right in by taking a look at our Example Mod. This mod is distributed as part of the FFModKit, on GitHub: https://github.com/Ponzel/FFModKit

Check out the FFModKit Example Mod folder. Once downloaded, you can put this directly into the mods folder and it should work with your game immediately.

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Making your first mod

As a first test, we’ll create a simple example mod that makes crystals shine super bright, makes them movable by the player, and makes them give 100 crystal resources when working on them instead of one.

1. Folder setup

Go to the mods folder at C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppDataLocalLow\Oachkatzlschowaf Interactive\Founders Fortune\mods and create a folder for your mod. Call it something interesting, like “Essential Crystal Mod”

2. config.json file

In this folder, create a file called config.json. Open the file using any text editor and paste the following:

{
	"name": "Essential Crystal Mod",
	"version": "1.0",
	"author": "Your name",
	"website": "https://your.website.or.forum.post.or.steamworks.page.com",
	"description": "This mod finally makes crystals useful. Not only do you get 100x resources from them, you can also relocate them easily and, oh, they shine brighter than the sun. Mining without sunglasses prohibited!",
	"compatibleVersions": [
		"Alpha 10.0"
	],
}

These infos are used by the game and by Steam to display your mod properly

3. The mod itself

Make your change to the game using a patch.json file.
It’s only important the file name begins with patch and ends with .json, so for organisation purposes, you can also name it something like patch_crystal_brightness.json if you want.

Paste the following in the patch file:

{
	"replaceOperations": {
		"furniture/crystal/constructable": true,
		"furniture/crystal/modules/resource/resourcesPerRound": 100,
		"furniture/crystal/modules/light/intensity": 2,
		"furniture/crystal/modules/light/range": 20,
	},
	"removeOperations": [

	],
}

These lines will the change the behaviour of the crystal object.
The way it works is basically this: Most types of objects in Founders’ Fortune are defined in json files. Crystals, and most objects that are interactable are defined in furniture.json, that’s why the replaceOperation begins with furniture. Most objects are categorized “furniture” because the game simply grew that way. Next, we simply follow the structure in the furniture.json file until we get to the parameter we want to change.

For more info on how this works, check out the tutorial on Founders’ Fortune configuration files and how to patch them.

4. Done!

Start the game and check the “Mods and Extra Content” point in the main menu. You should be able to see your mod and have it active to play.
Start a game and see if it all works!

crystalMod
crystalMod.png1015×751 944 KB

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Great tutorial @Daniel

Well laid out and easy to follow.

Can see that not only am I going to keep on spending hours playing the game, but now also playing with mods :smiley:

Haven’t done this much downloading for years :stuck_out_tongue:

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I use Linux, Kubuntu 21.04. That’s just Ubuntu core but with plasma-desktop and Kubuntu cosmetics and programs instead of the Gnome desktop. Will your mod program work with Linux as the file locations are in slightly different locations than Windows due to using steam play? Also, I use a different location for my steam library than steams default. Will the program let me enter a different directory path so I can point the different parts to the correct location on my SSDs?

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@Vince yeah, should work. Pointing to different locations can only be done with links.

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