I love modding. In fact, I love programming in general. I have checked the wiki and got everything I could from there, but it is far from a comprehesive documentation on how to mod Stellaris. I need to know several things:
- How to set the art assets for the things you create? (buildings, traits, ships, modules, etc)
- I don't really get how to create new weapons and systems for ships.
- Is it possible to transform actions like, for example, instead of removing a Tile Blocker, one tech lets you replace with something else, or instead of terraforming a planet, do something else to it (for example, make it a toxic dead world)... Things like that.
- Is it possible for a mod to issue console commands? Nothing particularly interesting comes to mind, but let me cite this silly example: once you build a colony you automatically populate the entire planet (via the console command populate). Or something else, because this particular commands requires the player to select a planet. The point is, can I issue console commands from my mod, and how can I do it? Because I could simulate a lot of behaviours that would be hard to implement using Sollaris mod language if I could issue console commands.
- Is there a way to simply flag something as not allowed by the AI players? like a race, a government model, a building, a trait, etc.
- Is there a way to make the tech prerequisites list behave as an OR instead of an AND?
That's all for the moment. I plan to have a lot of fun modding Stellaris, and if I ever get to create something decent I'll certainly publish it.
1. The art assets for ships and sections are located in Stellaris\gfx\models\ships. The .asset and .gfx files are the ones you would modify. They look extremely complex at first glance, but if you study them you'll pick up on it quickly.
2. I'm not really familiar with creating new weapons, but creating systems/utilities is fairly easy. The actual systems themselves are defined in Stellaris\common\component_templates, and then you'll also want to look at Stellaris\common\component_sets, which is where groups of systems are defined for certain slots (like the auras or sensors or whatever).
3. Yes, it should be possible. Some of this may require event coding, which is my personal weak point in modding, but there are others out there who know it inside and out.
4. I've never seen this done, and I honestly don't know if it could be... maybe with scripting, but I don't know for sure. I do know that you can actually create a list of console commands in a text file and place it in your Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris folder, and then run it with a single command from the console. For instance, mine is called "captainx3.txt" and includes a list of about 7 different console commands. When I start a new game, I simply type "run captainx3.txt" into the console and it executes the entire list of commands.
5. In most cases, yes... the exact code to do it varies by file, but if you browse around the vanilla files you'll see some examples of this.
6. I'm honestly not sure. Tech modifiers are picky when it comes to coding and can be a pain. My best advice would be to snag some of the major mods on the Steam Workshop and browse through their files to see how things are done. Just make sure you don't copy any mod code directly and then upload it as your own without asking first.
If you have any other questions, feel free to join my Discord server at
https://discord.gg/K9jUfws and either myself, a member of my dev team, or other users will be happy to try to answer them for you.
