I have a few questions about modding.
Will it be possible where you can mod the game without cracking the game?
Will there be a menu in the game or official website where we could access all the mods for Stonehearth so we don’t have to go hunting for mods in the forums?
wat.
Some sort of mod managing was announced, but to which extent remains unclear. There are a few mod websites/repositories out there and I’m sure more will follow (I might provide one myself - which will have a very different approach from current ones, however).
In the last livestream Tom said that we were making mods by cracking in the game and proceeding to edit the code. Will it be possible that we could make mods without finding a way to crack the game and getting the source code?
I think you may have misinterpreted what he was saying.
If I remember rightly he was saying that modding the game so far has involved inventive ways to kind of crack the game open and play around.
You won’t need to crack anything.
Oh . . .
My mistake.
I wouldn’t call it “cracking” (and I doubt Tom called it that) but I see what you mean. I’m not an official, so these are just my two cent and my thoughts about this.
This isn’t as much “cracking” as simply extracting the game files (using… hell, you can use Windows Explorer for that) and modifying them. In some cases, this can be the easiest way to mod something. In some cases, it can be the fastest way to do something. In all cases, it’s the messiest, worst and most likely wrong approach.
I doubt that this will change. If you really want to mod this way, I’m sure you can continue to do that even with the release. Yet, you shouldn’t. Nobody should have to do that (nor in some way have done that in the past). There’s a lot of things that can (and do) go wrong when you modify your game this way and none of them have pretty outcomes.
That being said, this method is hitting its limits. Between r27 and r34, two files have become “un-de-compilable”, i.e. they cannot be restored efficiently. There might be many more files like these - since those are logical errors, we cannot be certain why they are failing.
As it has been communicated recently (although I severely disagree with the reasoning and believe it is impossible to achieve), this won’t change either. That means if this trend continues - i.e. for whatever reason, unluac is unable to decompile files properly - more and more of this unwrap-hack-and-pack method will become inaccessible and therefore unattractive for people.
Like I’ve said, while this method should not be used, access to the source code - and not just documentation - is vital for modding, especially for more complex or exotic projects.
the modding tools will become more refined over time, making it easier for the average joe to mod new content (not to mention the helpful documentation that will also come available)…
Tom was pretty specific in this latest stream that Radiant is not going to be developing their own mod distribution platform, and will be leveraging existing sites (like Curse)…
I don’t necessarily see something baked into the client for accessing new mods, but rather managing those that the game reads on your system…
For all that is holy, let’s not leverage Curse.
I’m … conflicted… but that is indeed a very likely candidate…
regardless, I’m more interested in how SH let’s me manage the 17 mods I want to load (picking and choosing from among the dozens and dozens I’ve downloaded)…
A likely candidate, yes, but also an - from an user experience point of view - pretty poor one. What I want when managing mods is a simple, easy to use interface to download and update mods. I don’t want it to be an anti virus, I don’t need it to send mods to all my friends and I sure as hell don’t need an account.
I want to update mods automatically and all at once. I don’t want to go around and click one mod after another while there’s an advertisement blaring into my face that I could get a so much better experience by simply subscribing to Premium.
Of course they are a company and they need to get the revenue for their infrastructure somehow but frankly, I think the Curse client is one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever encountered.
… so much that I’ve written myself a Perl script which does the same. It’s not asking me for some login information, it’s not trying to sell me Perl 6, it’s managing to update multiple addons at once (and on its own) and it’s just four kilobytes.
There are 17 mods for Stonehearth? o.O Or are you making some top secret projects???
sorry! that was me, speaking for “future Steve”, who will have (at some point) downloaded those dozens and dozens of mods… 
There is most likely around 25 mods made right now, maybe some aren’t available or aren’t well known.
Well… I have 20 mods installed. If we omit radiant and stonehearth I’m down to 18… If we count RP as one it’s 16. But then I could simply pretend rp_geoffers_nightmares was still there, so I made 17 mods already!
Right. One day, when the modding API is more complete, you should be able to mod the game without decompiling the lua, or opening or editing anything that Radiant ships. Mods will be purely additive, and you’ll be able to write them using only documentation.
We’re still working on this. Stay tuned! 
oooo… you hear that? it’s the sound of a plot being thickened… 
cant wait! 