Soulash 2 v0.6.0 "Modding Tools"

Greetings fellow gods,

Late Happy New Year everyone, let's start 2024 with a bang! 

Today, I have for you the extended Modding Tools that some of you may be familiar with from the first game and Steam Workshop support to share your creations with the community.

I want to take this opportunity to encourage all players who like to express themselves creatively to give it a try! The tools, alongside simple JSON configuration files, offer a lot of flexibility to create your own enemies, items, special locations, abilities, skills, recipes, and even races with whole new civilizations! No coding knowledge is required. You no longer have to wait until I have time to add the playable goat people!

Let's quickly go through the main tools available to give you an idea of what can be done.

1. Entity Editor

The Entity Editor offers the ability to quickly create your own items, resources, enemies, or environmental tiles. It can be as simple as pressing a duplicate button on an existing entity and tweaking a few inputs or as complex as uniquely combining different components to create something unusual that could crash the game. Fun!

2. Map Editor

Soulash 2 offers a mixed approach of procedural and handcrafted maps in settlements and points of interest, and with the Map Editor, you can create alternative building maps for settlements or rooms for special locations.

3. Ability & Animation Editors

With these tools, you can create new combat abilities with custom animations for your future skills or custom enemies.

4. Datatables

This one might be interesting for those of you who like to know everything. Datatables offer information on all kinds of content available within the mod. Very useful for balancing.

And a list of JSON files for defining skills, milestones, amplifiers, passives, buildings, races, conversations, dialogues, special locations, natural resources spawned in biomes, weather conditions, portraits, and some worldgen properties.

Jumping between tools and JSONs may be a little clunky at times. Admittedly, I'm used to it since I've been using them for a long time, so I look forward to improving things with your feedback. We have local documentation available at Soulash 2/data/docs/index.html that I would encourage everyone interested in modding to check out.

There's a lot to tinker with, and the range of options will cause a lot of questions and issues, so if you're hitting a wall, join us on our Discord modding channel to discuss how to make things.

Other Changes

A few bugfixes I managed to squeeze into 0.6.0:

- Reduced overall memory usage of map definitions.
- Fixed attack speed issue where it would default to 1.0 due to hidden hands.
- Fixed Spikehump Spike not allowing assignment when crafting or upgrading.
- Fixed too low prices happening occasionally.
- Fixed issues with cave generation, causing some locations not to spawn correctly.

What's Next?

In the next two or three weeks, we'll focus on new content and reported bug fixes, and then I'll take a week-long break to recharge as I didn't manage to catch a breath yet after the EA release, and burnout is starting to creep in. After the break, I'll plan out updates in 2024 with your popular suggestions from Discord and announce the promised roadmap.

Thank you all for your support, and I hope you'll have a lot of fun modding the game,

Artur