So for the last couple of days I’ve frantically been trying to create my own simple mod that just adds a craft able item into the game. Without access to a QB editor I ended up copying the stone chest but increased its capacity to 1024 items. I’ve done this in previous versions by directly editing the stonehearth.smod, but in this case I wanted to make it standalone, a simple task, or so I thought.
After spending a little time reading through the settlementdecor I figured out the basics of what I needed to do. Fast forward a few hours and I had my very own smod. Excitedly, I jump into the game in anticipation of being able to store all the things in very few chests. Alas, this was a fleeting feeling as my lovely new item was no where to be seen. Puzzled, I spent the next few hours checking, double checking and triple checking all my files but to no avail.
Jump to today (insert ‘GOTO 10’ joke), and I decide to start afresh. A short time later I have a new smod ready to be tested. Load into the main menu and an invisible force grabs my hand and guides me to the settings menu. Here I find a tab for ‘Mods’ within which was my mod all greyed out with ‘invalid manifest’ error. Oooh, this is new. Hadn’t seen this before. Quick check of my manifest and lo and behold, I had a misplaced comma. Refresh the game, check the menu and am greeted with an ‘out of date’ error. Updated the manifest again to a higher version number and shabang, it all worked fine.
TL;DR
Checking the mod tab in settings menu to find out if the mod is even loaded saves so much time and effort troubleshooting!
Should anyone want to use it as a base reference to get started with A21 build, grab it here.
This an old pitfall. People assume that the manifest version is related to their mod, and obviously starts with “1”, or other numbering systems like 0.1
That is not the case, that version is the game mod api version, currently at 3. It is also not recommended to use a higher number to “cheat” the system or be “prepared to the future”, because it will just bring harm to your own mod. If the number changes, it means something big happened, with big consequences to mods and its purpose is to deactivate old mods. By cheating with a high number, your mod will keep trying to work, but failing, ruining the players experience.
Yes, mods works as folders, but that is just for making it easy to mod. To share with other users is preferred to compact it into a .smod.
The correct way is to zip the working folder (it must be *.zip, other compact formats will not work as they are internally different), then rename the extension to *.smod.
