User:Lumisteria

Basics of content pack modding

Content packs are mods that are loaded by a framework mod, which handles the technical work. That lets you make mods more easily, usually using JSON text files instead of C# code, so you can get your changes into the game without dealing with the programming.

Any mod can load content packs, but there are a relatively small number of core frameworks that most content packs are created for. Each framework has a different purpose, so you'll usually pick one (or several) depending on the mod you want to create.

Main Frameworks

Content Patcher (CP)

Content Patcher allows to edit a lot of the game assets, making possible to edit or add dialogues, images, maps and data. See also (link to article) for more details. Content Patcher is a generalist framework, and some specialised frameworks may be better for some tasks.

Json Assets (JA)

Json Assets allows to add new items, including new big craftable, crops, fruit trees, objects, hats, weapons, shirts and pants, boots and recipes.

Farm Type Manager (FTM) :

Farm Type Manager allows to spawn forage, ores, large objects such as stumps, and monsters, in various areas (including, but not limited to the farm)

TMXL Map Toolkit (TMXL)

TMXL Map Toolkit allows to add new locations, put custom NPC in festival spot, and various map feature, including LUA scripting for custom properties.

Finding errors

[link to json validator to include later]

The json validator is useful to find errors in the json format, including json files that aren't a manifest or a content patcher file. Without selecting a specific json format, the tool will only check the basic errors such as missing commas or brackets. When selecting a specific format, it will also checks errors like missing fields.

It also allows to share the .json with other people, to help finding errors. The discord is a good place to ask for help.

Commons errors :

Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: Y. Path 'Name', line 2, position 10.

This error means that there is either a character that shouldn't be here, or a character missing. You get informations useful to find the error, like the line where the error happens and the position when the character encountered is. Note that in some cases the position of the character isn't the position where the error is, especially in case of missing comma. The most common missing characters are commas (,), and quotations marks (").