Guide:MEB

From Starbounder - Starbound Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

UNOFFICAL MODDING EBOOK

This guide is an open community guide which gives you a much more over all look into modding starbound. This guide is open for anyone to edit and correct as necessary. The guide is arranged in such a way to give you a more linear approach to understanding the elements of starbound modding.

Introduction:

Disclaimer: Though most of the tutorial will be focusing on Windows OS. Majority of the guide is applicable to all OS. If anyone wishes to do so, please add any OS specific notes.

Starbound deals with 2 types of coding platforms. JSON and LUA. Majority of the Starbound deals with JSON which requires no knowledge of programming what so ever. JSON is also known as JavaScript Object Notation - and essentially it is a format which holds data to be later interpreted. So as long as you follow the same structure, you will be ok.
LUA on the other hand is a programming language, and it will unfortunately require you to learn the language to put it to full use.

The next thing we need are some tools to start writing up our JSON code. We cannot use advanced text editors such as MS Word because it uses special characters which are not the standard UTF-8 character set. So we need a program which is both free and extremely basic. But at the same time can open files and break it down into a more legible format. The best option for windows is Notepad++

Now we need to unpack our assets so we can start editing files. There are already numerous guides to do so, follow up here. Modding Basics
Once you finished unpacking. Take a walk through the unpacked files. To see the files right click on it and choose "Edit with notepad++" - pay attention to the extensions.
An important thing to note is certain code for one extension will not always be available for another.


Chapter Index

  1. Understanding JSON
  2. Our First Mod - Editing Vanilla files
  3. Creating a Custom Decorative object
  4. Creating an animated furnace
  5. Creating a crafting table



more to come.