Making mods is hard. Even though Reassembly is a fairly easy game to mod, modding eats up time and sanity for unexperienced people (such as me) . Because of this, I made this both a notes area and to help others like me.

The Reassembly Web Development Kit [atg.lychnobi.com] is an exellent piece of software. It exists in your browser up until it is downloaded into notepad or notepad++ or some other text editor.

There are four tabs: Blocks, Shapes (WIP), Factions, Regions, and Ships (WIP). As of now, either factions or blocks are important.

I will not go into too much detail for building blocks, but the basics are that when you click "Add Block," it (should) create a purple and black square with an identity: 0#1. This means it is block 1 in faction 0. If you click on the block, a list of things appears. Hovering over most things should tell you what you can do with them and what they mean. If you have not done blocks yet, do them now.

Factions is similar, but with less ability to do things. Again, I'm not giving too much detail, BUT you can create factions, choose their default colors, personality, etc.

Using RWDK, create your blocks (MAKE SURE NO TWO BLOCKS HAVE THE SAME "IDENT" VALUE), set their group value to your faction's value, and download them into your text editor. To get a folder, use a file explorer and make a new file, or upload a save as blocks.lua (right click menu), then replacing the blocks.lua and factions.lua with your downloaded notepads. (CTRL+C AND CTRL+V)

ENSURE YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE BLOCK WITH THE COMMAND FEATURE AND EITHER THE CANNON OR LASER FEATURE, FACTORY FEATURE , AND A THRUST FEATURE.

If you checked your mods in the mod section of the menu, you'll find at least one error. Among other things if there are bugs, it should say, "faction (your faction ID here) defines no ships," or something. To fix this, go to "sandbox" and you should see this:



Press "3" , click and drag to select the entire text, and press "Backspace." There should now be NO text whatsoever. Now, hover over the console, and type in palette (your faction ID), and then the entire palette should appear. Press and hold "Alt" while clicking and dragging the mouse to copy blocks and then build with them. Double click a finished ship and type into the console, "ssave (faction ID)_(name of the ship)" and it will now be a ship. Make sure, for your starting craft, it has all of the blocks you want in the starting palette, and close to 300p OR specify it in the faction code. Have not tried but heard it's possible. The system searches for craft nearest 300p, so make sure your starting craft has all the parts you want it to have.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE FOLLOWING:

[optional] CRAFT <100p, THE FACTORIES LIKE MAKING CHEAP SHIPS.

[optional] YOU CAN BUILD SHIPS OVER 8000P IF YOU WANT, BUT THEY MUST BE ABLE TO SPAWN FIRST (See: STEP 3: REIGONS)

[MANDATORY] AT LEAST ONE STATION (no thrusters, but torquers are okay) WITH A FACTORY


Type in FleetPalette (your faction ID) into the console to view all possible ships.

The final part (other than bug fixes) is ensuring you spawn in the galaxy, and not in the bottom left corner. You can fix this by replacing the "ident" value with your faction's, or use RWDK.

Fleets appear to be randomly generated groups of ships with a maximum and minimum value of P, and a "fraction" (?). The "fraction" appears to be the ratio of unique to fleet ships, though I have not tested this.

The "Unique" allows you to force spawn ships.

The asteroid density controlls asteroid to empty space ratio

The rest should be self explanitory.

If your mod has errors, view them, try to fix them. Frankly, i'm not the person to go to for help, but most bugs are easy. For example, you cannot use ID's to define missiles- they must be defined in the block.

There are also balancing issues- barrel length and number depend all all factors- so if you make a stupidly op gun, the barrels will extend farther than the ship itself. If there is too much thrust on a thruster, you cannot see, much less fight, what you are barreling into.

Also, if you define something as zero (or don't check the box), it will let reassembly do the work, and make your stupidly op gun worth 7896234P and cost 562789624897C to purchase. Make the P value 1 if you must.

Once done with bug fixes, go back to testing the mod, and repeat, until you are either insane, passing out, or satisfied.

These are a few issues I have run into when modding, or what people have stated in the comments, that are fairly common.

1. Always put your mod at the top of the loading order
2. Put all your mod data (factions, regions, blocks, shapes, and ships) into the same folder
3. If there are any errors, look at them, they can help.

"
Error saving '(null)': Can't save relocated ship
saved 0/1 ships
"
This generally means that the mod is probably too low priority and it's faction name is overwritten by another mod. To solve this problem, try disabling all other mods and bringing your mod to the top of the list.