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[Avelon]

One of these threads exists in the Fortress/Adventure Mode subforums and I was surprised to see there wasn't one here.

Newbies tend to ask the same questions over and over, but sometimes the questions will be fairly well researched and requiring either !!SCIENCE!! or an experienced modder, or both, to answer.

The purpose of this thread is to give modders a place to ask about things they cannot find answers to already in the Wiki and in the forum, to cut down on 1-shot threads and the derailing of existing threads (most of which are release threads for existing mods anyway).

I will add links to the various guides. If you are here to ask a question, check these out first as you may find (as I did) that the answers are frequently already out there. But if not, now you have a place to ask!

Shaostoul's All-In-One Mod Guide
This one has links to OTHER guides as well as the modding page on the DF Wiki. It's a great place to start and answered 4 out of the first 7 questions I posed to the community outright.

[Avelon]

Placeholder for a quick-reference for FAQs. Answered questions that are recommended to be placed here will be edited in. For now, here are some questions I posed in another thread and subsequently researched the answer to:

World Gen
Does adding in a command (reaction) to create an item that already exists need a world generation to work?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes. In some cases editing a reaction may work, but a reaction requires editing entities, which in turn requires a new world generation.

Is it within the limitations/scope of a mod to add a new Skill to the game? If so, can it be defined as clearly as the existing skills, i.e. with attribute associations and scaled output for items and effects utilizing it?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No. Skills are hard-coded. You cannot rename or alter them. You can reference them with a reaction as a skill that reaction uses but the output item will never have a quality setting.

Will the game account for creatures I create in the raws and add them to the generated world? And civilizations for sentient creatures modded in?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes. So long as you include all of the appropriate tags for your creations, and the world generation settings account for enough civilizations, any entity you add to the raws will be utilized in world creation.

More to come. If these answers are incomplete (or worse, incorrect), please do set me straight so I don't mislead anyone into unnecessary Fun.

[smakemupagus]

Not to talk you out of starting your own topic, but just so you know there is a quick response modding thread. 

[Putnam]

FAQs? Ooooh. There needs to be a FAQ on the wiki.

[Avelon]

Not to talk you out of starting your own topic, but just so you know there is a quick response modding thread.

Cool! Some of the knowledge from there can be transplanted here. The main attraction for this thread will probably be to newcomers and all of the knowledge gained can go in the second post FAQ if it isn't too specific or abstract. Do you agree there is a need for this thread? The one linked to goes a little over my head because of a lack of baseline knowledge most of the posters there seem to have.

As I learn I figured I'd make what I learned public knowledge so there's a quick reference guide for common problems and questions. Other guides already cover the 'once you're past the basics' but even the Wiki page goes from 0 to 9001 in the space of little more than a paragraph. The learning curve of the game itself is infamously bad enough, once we're over THAT hump I'd like to see if I can't contribute to making the curve a little more gentle when learning how to mod. =P Thoughts?

[Putnam]

When I was just starting a few months less than two years ago, I was in the questions thread. Any early questions can be pretty easily answered on the modding guide on the wiki.

[Avelon]

Hmm. Well, if it seems unnecessary... I suppose I can just take what I learn and make a guide of my own one day that is easier to use as a reference-all. It seemed like a good idea to have a thread like this bent toward clarifying and having a FAQ for things new modders will invariably think of with how (if possible) to do it.

Thanks for the input. I guess it wouldn't be dwarvenly to make it easy to get into modding, right? =P

[Putnam]

...It's very easy to get into modding. What do you have issues with?

[Avelon]

I've only got one unresolved question at this point, but the idea for this thread was originally to fill in the blanks and create a 'stepping stone' for others getting into modding because frankly, the discussions and questions in the existing question thread are centric on the differences between versions and are thus of a higher order - that is, the discussions at first glance went right over my head and I've been modding games for years. A few days and some experimentation later and that is no longer the case, but I thought to create a thread for novices to ask novice-level questions like 'Toady's description for the numbers and letters in the REGEANT line for reactions doesn't make sense, can someone shed some light on what all of that stuff means?' or 'I'm having trouble figuring out how to make a whole new race, I edited creature_standard but it doesn't show up!' - stuff that could be anything from a simple oversight or helps to clarify for people who find the Wiki explanation to be too technical what key aspects of modding are and do.

You see? Now, since it has been suggested that a thread like this has little to no demand, I'm planning on just letting it die, unless people actually do start posting FAQ questions or something like that. Personally I find there are a LOT of blanks to be filled in and some people will just not be able to do it by comparing mined data and then splice two pieces of code together to do something new. So I thought to fill them in as I encountered them because I can.

[Putnam]

Questions like that are what the other thread arde all about--you were looking at the earlier pages which were just after the interactions update. The later bpages are full of beginner's questions.