This folder is where you find access to all of the editable game assets:

E:\Steam\steamapps\common\Stormworks\rom\data

There are several folders within the directory that you can scan through at your leisure. For the purposes of our few quick examples here, we are going to focus on the missions directory in particular.

You will find the XML save files for all of your game vehicles here:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Stormworks\data\vehicles

Obviously where [username] is replaced with whatever you used for your system. Additionally if you just look at your root "Stormworks" user directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Stormworks

You'll also see folders for where your save games are located, and then in the data directory, the microprocessor save location... among other things.

When designing vehicles to manipulate the cargo boxes used during missions, it is very helpful to have access to the mission crate designs to test your creations. So our first simple task will be to copy the cargo crates from the game folder over to our saved blueprints folder.

In the Stormworks asset directory we copy these XML files:
...and we paste them to our saved blueprint directory here:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Stormworks\data\vehicles

Now we have the ability to pull up these cargo crate designs in our game and add them to our world as we see fit. I can actually test my cargo ships, cranes, and vehicle designs using the crates that I will be expected to heft around during missions.

So where exactly am I supposed to drive this thing?

In early versions of 1.0 you were allowed to despawn the tractor and trailer on the starter island (as well as the starter boat) for credits.

The devs knee-jerk reaction seemed to be "Hey, wait a minute! We didn't intend for you to play our game like that!" and they patched away the ability. It was a hasty decision IMO because the tractor-trailer has absolutely no use or function on the starter island and it makes far more sense to recover those vehicles and respawn them somewhere useful! I actually *thought* that was what the devs were hinting at by putting them there in an OBVIOUSLY useless situation.

Sigh... Ahhh well... so much for rewarding creative lateral thinking...

Good news is we can copy/paste the XML files for the tractor and trailer into our blueprints folder and spawn them to a more logical island location where they might actually be useful to us.

"Look Ma! ...it's a path to expore!"

You'll find the tractor and trailer from the tutorial mission in this folder as "vehicle_19.xml" and "vehicle_20" respectively.

As you may have already surmised... It would seem logical that if we can copy blueprints from the game folder over to our in-game editor; perhaps we can also edit an existing asset and copy it back to the game folder?

Looking again at the tutorial mission folder, we copy over the "vehicle_21.xml" file and notice that it's the starter island gantry crane!

What if we wanted to edit the looks of the crane, or maybe change-up the default connector design... possibly redo that control console? We can make those changes and copy the results back into the original game directory. Just make sure you use the same filename: vehicle_21.xml

Let's edit the looks of the crane a bit by adding some lattice work to the crossbeam.

...we paste it back into the game folder and presto! our starter island gantry crane now looks like this.

So hopefully you found this simple guide to mod the game assets useful. I use the term "mod" here very loosely in that it doesn't really require any advanced knowledge of modding. You just have to know how to use the craft editor in game and the locations of the game asset files.

Who knows, maybe there's a dockside fuel container or generator in there you can duplicate, improve, and redeploy around the islands as you see fit? Have fun!!