Overview
Learn how to mod from a guy who sucks at modding!
Find Cvars.txt
Finding cvars.txt on mac is actually, NOT easy, everybody always tells you the windows way to find it. The simple way is to open finder, click the search bar, and type ‘cvar’. Then go to the ‘This Mac’ tab to find it. If it didn’t show up yet, we have to do this the hard way.
The Hard way:
Open terminal
(Make sure you hit enter after you type these things!)
type ‘cd Library’
type ‘cd Application Support’
type ‘open Reassembly’
there should be cvars.txt in this file.
Also, once you finish, make sure to tag the ‘reassembly’ folder(right-click and select one of the colored circles below), anything in the Library folder WILL NOT, by default, show up in finder, and I’m sure you don’t want to have to type a bunch of stuff every time you want to mod.
[This is what should happen in the terminal. Blacked-out is User name, but underlined in green is what you typed.]
[What will pop up after the last command]
[Tagging the folder]
[And by selecting the tagged color, we now can find the folder!]
[Finally, the cvars.txt I was talking about!]
Prepping your mod
Ok. You found cvars.txt, yes? open it up.(personally, I use PROS editor because it will show you the file path.) Once you have opened it up, find ‘kwriteblocks’ and make it equal to 1, and delete the hash before it, this tells the game ‘BACK OFF, THIS IS MY NUMBER,’ and the game will then not rewrite it.
Open up reassembly(the game) and go to your saved games. Start a new game with a faction. Make a ship with ALL of the blocks. These blocks can be used in your mod or for reference, and can be removed from your mod later on. Save, and go back to the home screen. go to the saved games once agin, and right click on your save. Click ‘export as mod(create blocks.lua)’, and put it in a new folder in the reassembly folder, and title that folder ‘mods’. Name your mod something cool!
Now, remember how we tagged reassembly? Go to the mods folder we just made, and open up your mod’s folders.
Finish Prepping your mod
In the factions.lua, change the name to whatever you want, and change the <number>= to <new faction number>=.
In the reigons.lua, make ident = to <some number greater than 100>, and faction to <new faction number>.
Blocks.lua
Here, you can make all of the blocks in your mod. theres just too much to go over in block editing, so I will simply explain some things that most guides don’t bother explaining, or are hard to learn.
For the cannons, if you want to make their bullets explode, add another separate value: explosive=, to your block. You can choose between ENABLED(on impact), PROXIMITY(when explosion radius could touch another ship, explode on top of that ship.), and FINAL(Explode at end of range). You will need to add an explodeRadius= value to the cannon in order for it to work, the bullet damage is the damage for the explosion. If you want fragmentation, you can choose between FRAG_PROXIMITY(Not recommended), FRAG_IMPACT(Fragment upon impact), or FRAG_FINAL(Explode at end of bullet range.) additionally, there is FRAG_NOFLASH, which means no flash when the bullet frags! This is the only flag you can combine other fragmentation flags with. A | is used to separate flags with.
Here’s and example since it’s complex.
This looks pretty complex, but do not fear! We can see that the cannon shot frags on impact from FRAG_IMPACT, into 5 more cannon shots, roundsPerBurst determines this as we can see. The fragment’s damage is 100 each, and their size is 1. You also have spread, which is how the bullets are spread out, and it’s in radians so be wary, 1 is not 1˚! There is also the pattern, which has 3 options: SPIRAL(Spread bullets evenly in the spread angle), ABSOLUTE(Spread bullets randomly in the spread angle), and WAVE(I have no idea what this does). And as a final (unneeded) touch, the fragments have explosive, set to enabled, with a radius of 10. However, this is much more than you need, this is a base starter piece for frag cannons:
For missiles(and occasionally other blocks), you can add FIN to the features, but you will also have to add a value called finForce. This value, when given, decreases drifting, allowing for extremely accurate missiles.
Also, if you add a block with the features MELEE and THRUSTER, it will become triple purposed. It will be a melee block, a thruster, but most importantly, This block will, once detatched from your ship, thrust itself forever(or at least until it dies). This is super useful, because you can create custom missiles with the aid of decouplers. Credit to Prototype for this!
Aditionally, comments(do not affect anything, just tips for yourself) can be designated with –.
EX:
Publishing and bug fixes
Once you’ve made your mod, reassembly will automatically run it. Chances are, you’ll have a LOT of bugs. To see your bugs, go to the mods section in reassembly(In game, I mean) and click on see errors. It will tell you what it wrong there.
To publish your mod, go back to the mods section, and click on ‘publish mod.’ go to your steam profile, and go to your workshop items. It will appear there. If you want to unpublish your mod, just click the unpublish button. BUT… you need to go back to your mod files, and delete the steam.pfid file, otherwise reassembly will think your mod is still published and you won’t be able to republish it.
For the preview image, if you want to have a custom one, delete the preview.png file in your mod, and replace it with your own, BUT MAKE SURE YOU TITLE YOUR CUSTOM ONE ‘preview.png’!!
End
I hope this guide was helpful to you on at least some level, if any, and have a great day!