Starbound Modding Tutorial: Getting Started

this is your one and only firespark 81 with your daily dose of video goodness in today I'm going to teach you how to mod Starbound that's right we're going to learn everything you need to know from scratch how to mod Starbound I'm going to take you from the very beginning to creating this awesome gun here well it's not too awesome but it's a gun and it's modded and it's cool and I'm going to teach you how to make it today let's get to it so the first thing you're going to need in order to mod Starbound is a plain text editor now there's a lot of them out there but just download notepad++ I mean it's it's simple it's easy it's a good program it gets the job done it's not too bulky it's not too like clunky and stuff like that it it will do the job for you for what we need it for today and there's multiple different versions that you can download you can actually install it into your system or you can just download a portable version it's up to you whichever you want I mean if you really want some other random editor out there it go Google it it doesn't matter honestly what you get as long as it is made for coding and it is a plain text editor I will provide a link in the description below for notepad++ for anybody who wants to go download that after you have downloaded and installed notepad++ you're going to come on over here to the chuckle fish Community forms and you are going to download the mod pack helper it has a Windows and Linux version and once again I will provide the links for everything you need in the description below so you'll have the link directly to this and this uh form post pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how to use this program I'll touch on it briefly there is like I said a Windows version and a Linux version Mac users should be able to use the Linux version but today we're mainly going to focus on using this for Windows all you're going to do is click the link here to download the version and and but you're not really downloading anything it's actually going to open up a link to this page here so what you're going to do is just click in this box in here any anywere and hit controll a to select everything and then you're going to hit contrl C to copy everything once you have everything copied you're going to open your notepad++ and then you can either right click and paste or you can hit contrl V and that's going going to paste all of that text into your notepad++ window now this is your program right here this is this is it so what you're going to do after you have done that is go up here to file click save as and save it as whatever name you want to save it as I save it as mod helper then you're going to save it to wherever you want save it to your desktop preferably and we'll copy and paste it where we need it later after you have saved it it will have the file extension. txt if you do not see a file extension go Google whatever Windows system you have how to show file extensions and you should find a tutorial easy enough so once again if you have Windows 7 go Google how to see file extensions Windows 7 if your Windows 10 how to see file extensions Windows 10 and so on and so on you get the idea so you should see your file extension it should be whatever you named it as txt you're going to rename it and instead of having txt you're going to have bat so it should look something like this right here so if I click this and I click to rename it. txt and windows ask me hey do you really want to name it you can see it just changes to a plain text file cuz that's all a bat file really is if you're Linux I think it's a sh file so it just going to put that back to bat and windows once again Ask me and it's like blah blah blah you just tell yes and it's going to look something similar to this so this is the program that's going to help you unpack your assets you have to unpack your Starbound assets to figure out what things are and where things are located now your assets are going to be in your Starbound folder so if we bot back out here to our main Starbound folder it should look something similar to this if you downloaded Starbound through Steam it will be in Steam steam apps common Starbound and that should bring you to this folder right here then you want to go to your assets folder now wherever you saved your modh helper dobat file at you're just going to click it once again hit contrl C to copy it and then hit contrl V while you have this window active and it will paste it inside this folder once you have it inside this folder you're going to double click it and it will bring a window up that looks like this now this window here is pretty self-explanatory you can do one of two things inside this folder you can hit zero to just unpack your assets or you can hit two which is what's used to unpack mods and it'll ask you do you want to unpack all or do you want to unpack the packed file you can select either one of these cuz the packed file is what you want to unpack if you just do unpack assets it's going to unpack this pack file now you should actually be able to place this in your This Bat file in your main Starbound folder as well and it should do the same thing however I like placing it in the assets folder cuz I have had some problems with it where it wasn't able to find this file because this file is pretty much all of your Starbound so once you have unpacked it you will end up with a folder like this yours may be named pack or assets depending on how you unpack it whether you use the mod option or just the zero option just to unpack the assets file and you're going to get like U this basically the exact same thing that I'm showing you right now this is your Starbound game we'll get into that more in a second I want to show you one other thing that you can do with this mod helper program real quick we go over to our mods folder you can see that I have a copy of this bat file in the mods folder as well so if we double click it and we hit two to unpack mods you can see it gives me a list of all of mods I have in this folder so say I wanted to unpack the copy gun I could just hit 12 and enter and it will unpack the copy gun I'm not going to do it because I don't want to unpack it this will allow you to unpack mods and explore the code to figure out how they are made now I'm going to say this probably more than one time but we're going to start with one time to begin with listen to me very carefully do not copy other people's mods and label them as your own that's copyright infringement and it's stealing other people's hard work don't do it it's very rude it's inconsiderate it's against the law on top of that and just don't do it if the reason I'm showing you this is because you can learn a ton of stuff from unpacking other people's mods and seeing how they made them learn how they made them take that knowledge and use it to make your own unique once again unique mod so yeah just don't copy other people's work it it it's plain as simple as that don't copy it and don't say you did it okay let's get back to the tutorial now that I got that out of the way once you unpack a mod it's going to look something like these folders here this is actually what I'm going to show you how to make today and this is what an unpacked mod looks like it has a folder that directly corresponds with the same hierarchy that is within the Starbound assets folder and you just lead through it to wherever you're at to whatever you're modifying in the game and you make Chang changes to it one thing that you need to have in this folder is your metadata and I'm going to show you how to make that file right now so we're going to start from scratch I'm going to delete Mr uh number one gunny mcuny or gun mcuny here and we're going to create a new folder now I'm going to put a one in front of this just so it's at the top and it's easy to see and we're going to name it mod gun so it's easy for everybody to follow so we have our simple mod gun folder here okay now we're going to go into notepad++ now I already have this text from another mod but you can basically just copy and paste this and then fill out your own information and I will provide this little chunk of code in the description cuz it's relatively small this is going to be your metadata file for your particular mod whatever you're going to make so where it says author you're going to put your name of course I have firespark 81 one we're going to call this mod gun this is your description put whatever you want friendly name once again mod gun and then I leave everything else blank except for the actual name of the mod we're going to call it mod gun once again so once you have copy and pasted this text into your notepad++ and you filled out all of your information for whatever you want to name this as or if you're following along you fill out what you see here but you know put your name here instead you're going to go up to file and save as so after you click save as you're going to see this window here now all you're going to do is type in the file name as dot meta data and that's it then you're going to where it says save as type you're going to click this bar right here and you're scroll up to the very top and you're going to select all file types and then you're going to click save save so now if we go back to our main mod folder you can see we have the metadata file so now you're good to go you have that out of the way and you're going to do that for every mod when you load Starbound and you click the little gear down in the bottom right hand corner and it shows you the mod info that's that's what this where that comes from is this file right here okay now we're going to browse the assets folder and start creating a file directory here we are in the assets folder we're going to go to items then we're going to go to active then we're going to click on weapons then other and then we want the gristle gun so what you're going to do is create that same file hierarchy over in our mods folder so let's go back to our mod folder we're going to create a new folder and we're going to call it items then we're going to go inside that folder we're going to create another new folder and we're going to call that active then we're going to create another new folder inside that one and we're going to call it weapons then we're going to go inside that one and create one more folder called other then we're going to go inside that other folder now we're going to go back to our assets folder and we're going to copy and paste that entire gristle gun folder over into this mods folder we're back here at our assets we're just going to select the gristle gun hit contrl C and then go back to our mods and then hit contrl +v and that's going to paste it in there now we have the needed hierarchy for the gun to create this mod now's where the fun begins cuz I know you are like let's just get to the modding already I want to make a cool gun so now we're going to you have to rename everything you see here to something different because if you have the same name and you tried to load Starbound right now Starbound would have a stroke and say no you can't load it because there's too many of the same names cuz everything has to have a unique name so what I like to do is name everything the exact same thing that I'm going to call it with just no spaces I just run it all together so we're going to call this mod gun or you can call it bone gun like I called it actually let's do that let's just call it bone gun like I called it before bone gun okay now what I like to do is we're just going to highlight where it's this bone gun see right here we're just going to highlight that like that and we're going to hold down control and hit C get used to hitting that button a lot because you're going to love that button combination when I'm done with you today so you've copied bone gun right that's it none of the rest of this just bone gun and we're going to go over here to this art asset is.png and we're going to hit we're going to select just the beginning part everything before the PNG and we're going to hit contrl V there you go you've done it now let's do it to the other art asset same thing except we're going to leave this dash six or six here because this gun can actually be leveled up to level six and when it does it changes its appearance so we're just going to do that just like you see there now let's get into modding this gun if you have notepad++ installed you should be able to just highlight this bone gun. active item and right click on it and click open with notepad++ if you have not installed it and you're using the Standalone portable version you go into notepad++ you hit open and you navigate to this directory and you open it up once you have opened it you should see something that looks exactly like this well not something you will see exactly what you're seeing right here if you followed along and managed to follow directions and done everything exactly as I've told you to this is what you should be seeing inside notepad++ right now see this right here look this is one of the reasons why I love this program so much and I mean I know other ones do it but I just love notepad I'm a little partial to it all right let me have it just let me have this one anyway so we're going to double click it this right here where it's called the gristle gun and you see how it highlights everything else green for us anywhere it says that we need to hit contrl V and paste in what we've named our item which is bone gun and you can see it in this tab right here bone gun. active item so that's what we want to change everything's name to so we're going to take change that to item name bone gun will come down here this and another thing I like to do is just give it a quick scroll just to make sure it's nowhere else get in the habit of doing that now it's going to help you when we start doing more complex stuff right now this is pretty easy and it's nowhere else but just keep that in mind in the future once you've highlighted that item for the thing that you need to replace just give it a little scroll down and see now there's another way you can do control find or you can do a find and replace but it's easier just to I mean there's like three here so we're just going to hit crl V select this one contrl V now we've changed everything we need to change you know we renamed that PNG so this is pointing to that now that we've given it its own unique name now we can start having a little fun with it so we're going to change its description here so when you highlight over it so we're going to throws bones okay yep there you go its short description is basically its name so we're going to once again call it bone Space Gun we're actually going to put a space in it this time cuz this is what you're going to see in game and be able to read now this is where we get to start having some fun because everything you see in here can be changed to have a different effect we're going to start off with something relatively simple we teach you you how to do something fun and you can do all kinds of different stuff with this and play around with it and have a blast you're going to scroll down the page till you see projectile type right now it's listed as bone Thorn Let's go to our assets folder real quick so this is why the assets folder is so important so we're still here where it says gristle gun now this is laid out pretty easy to follow so what we're going to do is we're just going to go back to our main unpacked assets folder you can see all the files here that we originally unpacked this is the main base of the folder and we need projectiles because what this is looking for we come back to notepad++ real quick what this is looking for is a projectile type so anything in the game that is a projectile we can put here okay let's go back to that folder so we need to find projectiles so let's scroll down oh what do you know there's a folder that contains all of the game's projectiles how about that so we can double click on that and we can go here and look at the different projectiles that we have available to us I already know that the bone is a throwable projectile so we're going to go into throwable and we can do bone and what I have already done and what I showed you at the beginning and technically this bone and you'll you'll learn to figure this stuff out once you start messing around with Starbound it's pretty easy to start figuring out how they have things laid out there's an item in the game and I'm sure all of you know it called the throwing bone or throwing bones this is the projectile that comes out of those so that's what we're copying and pasting into this so the gun shoots these instead of whatever it was that the Bony Thorn or whatever it was you can actually change this if you wanted to anything listed here so you've already seen the the the bone let's let's change it up to something a little bit different just to to give you all an idea of how this works so we can go in here to The Hive bomb now what you're looking for is this projectile file this has got the name that you need it's probably Hive bomb but get into the habit of opening the file and looking at its proper name so we're going to do that right now we're just going to right click on it and click open or edit with Notepad Plus+ once again if you did not install notepad++ and you're using the portable version you're going to have to navigate all the way there and open this file that's why I say just install it it's a thousand times easier to follow along with what's going on right now so like I said the name of this projectile is Hive bomb you can see it right here projectile name right there if I was to put a space there you see it projectile name so and its name is Hive bomb we can copy and paste this entire chunk here and just paste it over all of this but it it's easier just to select what's inside the quotation marks and copy and paste that so we're going to do that right now we're to copy and paste that so now if we were to load up the game and spawn one of these in it's going to shoot the hive bomb projectile so we're going to go ah aead and save that we're going to just do that we'll come back and I'll show you just in case you wanted that bone gun I'll show you how to make the bone gun but for now we're going to do this Hive bomb just so I can demonstrate how this works once you've done that you can mess with any of this other stuff you can change its damage so we can make it hit harder if we want we can make it use less energy let's just make it use 0.75 energy you can change its inaccuracy you can change the amount of projectiles that it fires let's make it fire two instead of one that's awesome uh you can make it uh I'm guessing this fire type is probably Auto or semi-auto and it's status effect it's going to create a weak poison it's got knockback I mean it's all relatively easy to follow stuff how many times the projectile bounces and it's damage kind I mean you could change all that so we can make it bounce twice if we want let's do that see if that does it okay so let's save it let's get out of that as it stands right now we could load the game up and we could spawn this in but I don't want to spawn it in I want to create a legit mod where I can actually craft it through the crafting menu and I don't want any just any old crafting menu I want to be able to hit C and craft it through that menu so now I'm going to teach you how to do that so we're back in our main folder so this is our main folder active weapons remember we created all this gristle gun there it is now you can actually change this this doesn't need to be gristle gun it can stay gristle gun it doesn't really matter I'm actually going to change it to Bone gun just so we know that this is ours we're going to go back out to where we were so we're in our main folder here now you're going to want to create a new set of folders and I could show you all this but it's just easier just to to follow along I'll show you here in a second just follow along with what I'm doing right now create a new folder and name it recipes okay once you've done that you're going to go into that folder and you're going to create a new folder again and you're going to name this folder empty hands okay so we have our folder empty hands now you're going to go inside that folder called empty hands and this is where we're going to put our main recipe so I know what you're thinking right now you're thinking that's great but where do I get this recipe file from how do I know what to put in that folder well I'm going to show you that right now so we are going to go back to our assets folder and that file hierarchy that I just told you you're going to you're about to see that over again so we're going to scroll down till we see recipes of course right there it is recipes now we're going to scroll down till we see empty hands right here it is empty hands and we're going to go in there now these are all of the base recipes that you get in the game that you can craft inside your C menu where we're going to use the campfire recipe so you're just going to highlight it and what are you going to do you're going to Hitt contrl C we are going to go back to our mods folder and we're going to hit contrl V now we've placed our recipe in there we are going to rename that recipe to Bone gun keep everything the same name then it's easy to keep track of what you're doing so get in the habit of doing that now because we're going to do more complex stuff later on so once you've done that you're going to to right click and open or edit that with notepad++ so right click edit with notepad++ and then you will see this here this is your recipe now I don't want it to cost anything but one item if you want it to cost more items you can easily do that what you do is just put a comma here and then you copy and paste everything between these brackets so you would just hit copy it go to the end here hit enter and paste you can do this as many times as you want to add as big of a recipe as you want but I don't want any of that so I'm going to remove all of that get rid of that whole line and make sure you get rid of this comma if you only have one item on the line you don't have a comma now we're just going to make it cost one wood block that's it that's all it's going to cost it's or One log sorry one log Block it's going to cost us one log to make this now the item name oh can you guess what the item name is it's bone gun because that's what we put in the item name we can go back and we can take a look and I'll show you real quick item name bone gun this right here is what you copy and paste or type out input right here that's it you get one you can change it to give you two if you want it to give you two but we're going to leave it at one and then you're just going to hit crl s or come up here and click this little save icon whichever I just just get in the habit of hitting control s it's quick it's easy and it gets the job done so once you've done that in your recipe empty hands folder you should have bone gun. recipe and it should have that inside of it and you should be somewhat good to go we're not completely done yet now you're going to go back out to your main mod folder that you're creating your mod in so you have your items your recipes your metadata we need one more file in here and that is the player.on fig. patch file now I'm going to show you this file what I'm going to do I already have one I'm going to copy and paste it and then I'll show you how to create it so here it is this is what the file name looks like this is what patches your player file so let's take a look at it in notepad++ so this is what the file looks like inside notepad++ this is what it looks like when you open it and once again this is a tiny little bit of text and I'll actually copy and paste this into the description of the video so look for it down below so you don't have to rewrite it out so what you're going to do is you're just going to create a new file and you're going to copy and paste this little bit of text into that new file now this one here says bone spur we're going to change this to say bone gun it's our item name that's our item name this is what it's looking for Value the value that it's looking for is the item and the item needs a name which is bone gun leave the rest of this the same after you have done that you're going to go to your file you're going to click save as and you're going to name it exactly what you see here so save it into your mod folder in name it player do config patch if you save it with the txt extension which you probably will just rename it and remove that extension and then save as is like that and there you go you are good to go now if everything's done and you followed along we should be able to load up Starbound and this gun should be in our C crafting menu so let's go take a look okay so here we are in Starbound so first thing you're going to want to do is go into admin mode so hit enter hit slash type admin and hit enter I was already in admin mode so it took it away from me I'm just going to hit p and that re repes the command basically or reruns the command so it put me back in admin mode now we're going to hit C and we're going to look for our bone gun should be in here somewhere mine's pretty cluttered but here we go and as you can see it's going to cost us one wooden log we're in admin mode so we don't need to pay that cost we can just hit craft and it will craft it for us and now we have it in our hand and we can fire it holy sweet but Jesus did that fire fast look at that whoa and of course it fires two projectiles and they bounce twice see that they hit the ground they bounce they bounce and then you know they fire freaking things everywhere and good God do they fire fast this is one crazy gun that we've created you like that's kind of cool I like that gun but I want to change it a little bit and I don't want to exit out of out of Starbound and go through all of that trouble and deal with all that and blah blah blah that's annoying okay here's what I want you to do I want you to bring up your inventory and and I want you to go over here and just delete that gun okay now you're going to stay inside Starbound we're going to go back to that mods folder okay so we're in our main mod folder here where all of our mods are held we're going to go into our mod gun and we're going to go into items and we're going to go into active weapons other bone gun and here we are and we're going to open up our active item file so here we are in our Act active item file we're going to scroll down till we see that projectile here is our projectile now I want to change this I want to change this to something neat so let's go back to our assets folder and see what we can change it to we're back in our assets folder so right here's our projectiles we're just going to go back into here and I really like the throwables there's a lot of cool stuff in here let's change it to the Bone like the original gun I showed you in the beginning so if we right click and and click edit with notepad++ it's going to take us back into notepad and you can see that the name of that projectile is bone so we're just going to copy and paste that into where it says Hive bomb so now it should say bone then you're just going to hit crl s and save it okay it's done now if we go back into Starbound okay we're back into Starbound we are going to hit C and we're going to craft our bone gun again now if we fire it oh look at that now it's it's throwing the the the bones isn't that neat now if that didn't happen if for some reason it was still throwing the hive all you have to do is hit enter type slash reload and then hit enter now your game's going to lag depending on how old your computer is it may lag for a few seconds but it'll eventually stop and it will reload all the assets once it does that you want to delete whatever you're creating so we're creating the gun so we would go ahead and delete that and then we would craft a new one now the reason you have to constantly craft a new one is is because the way it works it actually spawns the item and the item contains the code that you've created in the assets so a lot of you should probably know that you can actually spawn items in and edit them in game with spawn commands it's kind of the same Principle as that with mods once you spawn the modded item in it's like that even if you make changes to the core mod that item still stays the same while you're in game so delete the item create a new one every time you make changes and you will see those changes if you don't just type slash reload when you're in admin mode you can see now that this one is different from our last it is actually firing two bones because our last one I only had it firing one if you look really close you can see that there are two bones there and they actually do not bounce because this projectile doesn't have that capability and that is it for today's modding tutorial if you all like this video let me know down in the comments let me know if you have any questions and all that stuff if it does great and you all seem to like it I will make more videos showing you how to make way more complex stuff I'll show you how to make all kinds of crazy stuff you can mod into this game pretty much anything you can think of and I'll show you how to do that and we'll start with some some really neat weapons and I'll show you how to actually modify this projectile so you can make your own custom projectiles that is going to wrap it up for this video but before I go I want to give a quick shout out to my patreon supporters thank you so much for all of your support you all are amazing if you would like to become a patreon supporter please check check out the link in the description below if you enjoyed this video please leave a comment down below let me know what you thought if you're shy and you don't like to comment just hit that thumbs up button and show your support until next time thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: FireSpark81

Views: 58,121

Keywords: Firespark81, Firespark, Starbound, How to mod Starbound, Modding Starbound, Starbound modding tutorial, tips for modding Starbound, Starbound mod help, Starbound coding, Starbound codeing, Mod Starbound, Starbound mod tutorial, Getting Started modding, Starbound modding first steps, Starbound unpack assets, Starbound how to make custom guns, Starbound custom guns, Starbound gun mod, Starbound assets, Starbound how to make mods

Id: Yqs3rCTBWA8

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017