Although it's mentioned there's a mode you can turn on for modding, the actual ability to mod seemed a little out of reach...

At least until now...

I found notes regarding a python file extractor, naturally I don't use python, but I gleamed enough information that I was able to build my own extractor from scratch and have it completed; In a little bit I'll create an archiver that will be compatible... or I hope so (file order could be important, which I'm not sure of the rules on yet).

Basically what I understand is Modding is basically similar to Morrowind, being that local files override files in their archive...

However there's some 15,000 files. Directory structure doesn't seem too bad...

Now for just a comprehensive guide on what half the information means... Although a good portion of it is in English for the most part... I'll probably be experimenting in the next few days on this...

Interesting...

Anyways, managed to add a Quality repair tool and Master Craft repair tool as tests. Found out some things...

First: It works!

Second: If the BIG.FILE is present it won't use local directories, so you have to extract and remove that if you want it to work.

Makes for a good test environment though...

I'm considering adding new recipes that make things easier, like making roofs at x10 rather than x1 (although the ingredient list is 10x more too so...)

It's curious that there's a big warning at the top of the crafting file that says not to edit it directly as it's generated from a spreadsheet, but seeing as that spreadsheet isn't present, I wonder how SnowedInStudios intends to keep it mod-able while at the same time not screwing with their sources...


edit: Just a note, the game seems more stable and a little faster when running it extracted (on a ramdrive). This means likely the internal functions they use for cross referencing the data from the BIG.FILE there's a few extra calls that might end up making it run out of memory.

This is merely a guess though...

Done quite a few changes... And came across the dev unlock mode, which is curious. So with it been making several ships. Most of these are variations on the current ships, and a couple new ones...

I'll probably release my mod fairly shortly and see how it goes. Although there seems to be a good number of things that are not in a howto from Snowed In Studios, but there's enough to make some interesting changes...

I'm not aware of any other mods out there yet, so here we go:

Era's WindForge mod v.02

Changes (in no particular order): v.02

* Grinders have higher crafting qualities, and two new materials (admantium & titanium). Unfortunately I lack Photoshop so they look like steel grinders still
* Repair tool at higher qualities increases in effectiveness (Sorry, disassemble tool didn't improve at all)
* Building materials, refining, and bulk items added or changed to x5/x10 (recipes with more than one ingredient was skipped out, sorry :(, might still be a few left )
* Iron/Titanium/Adimantium blocks/backgrounds can be converted back to ingots.
* Added recipe/item Helium in a bottle (has -1 weight)
* Feral bosses can be tamed (was in the python extractor, so it's here)
* Side quest Temples now named instead of only numbered.
* Side quest with Lars (and the hunting rifle) has added hint.
* new ships (simply for flavor/variety, not very practical mostly)
* Mantis meat (Was commented out in the loot list, simply added it back in)

edit: updated link

Nice to see someone modding this (and learning it's even possible). Hopefully someday you or some other modder can fill the gaps left by dev. The game just felt incomplete with so many building blocks only available on some low grade materials. It should not even have been difficult for devs to add higher grade material versions of doors, supports and such as it essentially would've ilvolved recoloring of existing sprites and writing few lines of code to give them statistics.

Unfortunately I just completed the game couple weeks ago and really don't feel like replaying it. But I'm sure your mods and possibilities it offers interests others so good luck! Just wish mods could fix the horribly unoptimised game engine and movement/controlls (died hundred deaths trying to land on something and missing or due to controls sending me flying sideways when I just tried to take step closer to edge of cliff) but that's just wishfull thinking ;-p

Yeah there is that. There only being 3 kinds of doors (wood, iron, driftwood) does drop some level of immersion when you want to make a fully steel ship and have to default to iron doors... If someone modifies the dds files and gives the various color differences i'd happily add the new materials in the next mod patch (assuming there is going to be one).

Although I'm not sure. Some of it may be intentional. Grinders for example had only 1 type (before my mod), which was steel. I've made a large ship that has the bottom covered in grinders, some helium balloons for buoyancy, then i damage the balloons so i don't have to constantly push on the S or D key to grind away.

In all honesty, steel grinders are fine for everything except getting adamantium. they do 180 damage a second (12 damage * 15 times a second). But my higher quality and titanium/adamantium seem to just melt through everything like butter, makes me wonder if it was a balance issue... But you can make engines and propellers that are higher quality of every material type...

There are probably 3 materials i wish didn't get converted into blocks when they are broken (and their backgrounds): Stone, blubber, and shell. Creating new materials that look like the old but require a 1:1 or some additive so they aren't just meat or organics might make it so it doesn't just crumble and be left unfixable without actually putting stuff back on the ship.

Anyways i still have a long list of things i wanted to add but didn't get to, which includes:
* more ships (i added 6, one which isn't a ship but.. you'll see :P),
* more monsters (larger versions of shaugs and beetles)
* spikes of other types/qualities (i couldn't find the spike item data...),
* Usable Batteries (generates gas)
* extra quests (fetch and make me stuff quests)
* continued quest involving the vulcan engines
* stronger/better throwing rocks (to include multiple rock throwing)
* stats to 200 with benefits
* add more diamond based items (diamond dagger, throwing rocks, grinder)

I had thoughts of adding aluminum, but opted not to.

Congrats and GIMP?

Well i know i'm not the most artistic person...

I've opened the dds files up in PaintShop, but it warns me there's extra meta information (MIPS?), which i'm confused about what it's for or how it works. I'm hesitant to edit any files unless i know what the result of editing it will be. It could be for animations, it could be for different sizes pre-rendered, it could be extra depth/lighting effects, transparency, etc. I really don't know.

Mmmm so it was for pre-rendering... In Paintshop it showed about 6-8 smaller versions of the image, but i don't know how it would act if i were to just save (assuming i could save, the dds could just be read-only for my psp).

More likely i'd refer the images to my GF who is an artist and have her repaint the doors/hatches different colors (or just color adjust/swap). Once it looks good i'd use gimp to save it. But that has a VERY low priority, probably a month or so until i continue modding or playing windforge to that degree.

I might add more ships and see if i can add larger monsters that are already present as the sandbox/end of game mode. As for quests, it's confusing... Could build a town i guess... maybe a floating fortress? That would be interesting... Use rock and sand and gravel for materials, and titanium for the outer layer to hold it all together... Maybe a hidden portion filled with blubber for added buoyancy. Perhaps some HUGE propellers as well, or several large zeppelin balloons.... Or a castle build around an island instead of on top of it or separate... Makes more sense that way... Maybe a town in the lower gas layer that's closed off with plenty of air purifiers... More likely it would be a shack to buy food and supplies...

Well you can pretty much hollow out a floating island in ~20 minutes with vibroblade and max strenght, or could if game performance did not gradually deteriote as you mined... :-p As for Grinders, you could either rebalance the stats or just have higher grade do same damage but have more hitpoints. (iirc some of the adamantium stuff (propellers/engines iirc) perfomed worse than steel/titatinium and was heavier. Only benefit was more hitpoints.) Wasn't diamond drill the only thing you could make out of diamonds? Most useless material ever cosidering you can actually buy one from one of the stores. :-p And my vibroblade mined adamantium faster anyway :D More variety and stuff to do is always good.

Pretty much did that. Looked at propellers and weapons to determine how the weapons got better. Basically you have a base price, then it's 15% higher for quality items, and 25% for MasterCraft items. The effectiveness is similar, 15% and 30%.

Titanium had the same hitpoints as their steel counterparts, but weighed 15% less and did like 2x more damage. Price-wise 2x.

Adamantium had double the hitpoints, weighted 2.5x more, and did 4.75x the damage. Price was 8x higher.

Then selling price was 1/4th, scrap value was 20% higher than the selling price (usually).

I think so, off the top of my head... Curiously i could only find diamond down below, and it's actually rarer than Adamantium (or that's the impression i get with those tiny 4-sized pockets).

It felt like they originally intented to send you down there to retrieve diamonds to make drill capable of extracting adamantium but scrapped the idea at some point or ran out of time. I don't recall anyone talking about them in game or where to get stuff in general other than the artefacts/tablets. I'm pretty sure I skipped adamantium after finding it performed worse (I forget the details but but iirc adamantium propellers and engines had less power than titanium/steel ones) so I jumped to next materials (vulcan steel and one other) right away.

I don't even remember making any cloudstone before the end. There really was no need and most of my ship was still made out of wood :-p. I just reinforced some parts but never got around to to doing complete retrofit. I didn't even add artillery. The armor piercing machine gun variant worked just fine. So balance was way off from midgame to the end :-/. Nothing really stood a change against me by then so no point of futher upgrade. The sideways isometric angle game is portrayed in did not help the matters as it made ship building needlesly difficult. I don't even get why they chose that angle instead of traditional straight side view.

Btw, did you actually use the grinders to mine in your game? I tried them but gave up after few tests as it was assasins blade/vibro blade mining was way more effective and you were not constantly harrased by monsters or hostile ships. The cannons seem better for the purpose as well (saw them used or it in some youtube vids) but had the harrasment problem as well. I also tried to use them as rams to ram enemy ship with but that didn't work well either.

Would have been interesting, since the jack hammer is the only thing early on that does extra damage to blocks specifically for mining, and adamantium still takes a while even with the best weapon and full strength attacking it...

I'll agree, propellers, engines and whatnot are kinda useless when made from adamantium. The firestone engine by far is the best engine you can get (1 engine gives you like 19,000 energy).

Hmmm as i recall cloudstone is good for increasing your jump/buoyancy, a full set of cloudstone armor (regardless of type) will let you jump from one screen to the next relatively easy removing the need for a ship... However it's not very practical :P I recommend 1 cloudstone item, 2 at most for wearing. Beyond that i found it far more useful to have the cloudstone combat knife (at least until i got the vibroblade, which the cloudstone one kicks ass at like 390 damage 3-5 times per second :P )

And of course if you need more buoyancy you can always make cloudstone backgrounds which add some effect while also filling int he walls and being similar to titanium (as the ingredients include titanium). As much as i love the stuff, it has very limited uses.

Not in my original game no... It was too much work to set up, and they are awkwardly setup so you have issues trying not only to align them, but where they do damage is sorta vague. (After looking at the sources for the grinder, they do damage for 2 blocks straight in front of them, none on the sides or anything which sounds stupid).

The more recent game i've made a ship with grinders, and can do heavy grinding, works great on everything EXCEPT adamantium (which takes like half a minute to eat through). However with my mod with adamantium grinders, grinding everything is considerably easier, i'll see about getting a screenshot later for you to see my current ship... weighs like 100 tons from the adamantium grinders.

Thanks for the work on the extractor. Will it support -c option in the future? Right now it doesn't seem to do anything, just displays help message again. Your solution with ramdisk is interesting, but Windows already do almost the same with read cache, if you have enough memory. First game start with extracted BIG.FILE is slow, subsequent launches are as fast as with original archive present (on my machine, YMMV). With ramdisk, I would have to copy the game over on every reboot (same delay as just starting from HD) and as a "bonus", Windows can no longer decide to throw away unused parts of the cache when under memory pressure, so the game would just crash instead...

Anyway, some notes about the actual changes:
- this is just a technical nitpick, but the patch messes with white space where not necessary. Replaces spaces with tabs on lines with no other changes, and the changes themselves do not follow coding style of surrounding text. The original lua code looks like it was generated with no tabs and indent of four spaces. Changes like these make reading the patch bit more difficult and increase chance of conflicts when porting to future game versions
- I don't think some of the changes in recipes were a good idea. Adding higher craft quantities is ok - even if a bit redundant, the game lets you hold left button for a while and I find it quicker than sorting through various quantity increments. But REPLACING existing recipes with higher quantities... Example: my ship has four gun mounts, why should I have to get ingredients for FIVE large motors as lowest craftable quantity when upgrading? Same with firestone ingots, right now I need 9... that 1 ingot reward from a quest will sit in my inventory forever until I sell it, because I can't get to a useful round number anymore.

On the other hand, higher quality repair tool is awesome!

Thanks