Topics

I'm working on a materials mod for the early game, with utility in any tech level, that's focused on clay. Atlas told me he wasn't ever totally happy with the Atlas Materials mod, and it steps on a lot of other popular mods' toes, since it introduces so many materials. My aim was to strip it down to the most basic element, and then expand on that.

So I focused on clay and bricks. Both present there, but not in many other mods. I've personally wanted a stand alone clay and adobe mod since I got frustrated with Medieval times, but missed that building material after I removed it.



As of now, the mod adds three new minables, red, blue, and grey clay, with hues about as close to real life as I can manage. I'm not happy with the vanilla stone texture for them, so I'm considering borrowing from Cupro's stone mod, to see if I can get it more detailed looking.



In addition to the two clay types, there are designated spots for digging sand and mud from appropriate ground types. You can also crush chunks into sand. I'm working on a compatibility patch between that and Rainbeau Flambe's fertile fields and Concrete mods which also feature sand pits and rock crushing.

The clays can be combined with sand, and baked into bricks at kilns (fueled and electric variants) which allow you to produce a fair number of cheap building materials, more resistant than wood, but less so than stone. For maps with little rock to mine, or scarce wood to spend on cheap construction, they're a nice boost.



Mud can also be combined with hay and baked in the kilns to produce adobe, which is far easier to come by the materials for, but generally on par with wood in terms of quality. Minus it's not being flammable. The result is cheap materials, potentially infinitely producible (provided you have power/fuel, and pawns with nothing better to do than slowly dredge up materials) AND which have some significant limitations on what they can be used to build.



Rather than be considered "Stony" stuff, theses are all "Bricky" stuff. They can be used to construct walls, but not doors, and only some types of furniture. They can't be used to make weapons, though in a pinch, you can grab a sack of bricks and throw them at attackers.

My next step is to expand the concept a little bit. Clay as a sculpting material is proving strangely difficult to implement. But once I have it sorted out, I intend to have three simple materials for artists to work with, which are likely better than most stones, but will require an investment of time and skill to make. Sculpting Clay, Terracotta, and Porcelain statues should all be in place before I launch this, officially. I'm considering a few additions down the line, such as classical style pottery sculpture alternatives, but the mod is basically functional now, and tests well.

There area a handful of mods I know of that add Clay as a resource or even a mine able wall type, and that allow you to make adobe and/or bricks, but it seems that they all also add a lot of other things. In every case, I'm bumping into them adding redundant things, that don't play well with other mods I use. Fertile fields is a little clunky about clay, and steps on Vegetable Garden's toes a bit. Atlas' Materials adds a whole bunch of materials, like glass, and plastics, but things like Rimefeller also add plastic. Medieval Times adds a whole extra era's worth of content.

I'm in the process of patching some of my industry and material mod favorites together, but I'm wondering if anyone might do me a favor and create a mod that just adds Clay and Bricks.

Short of (maybe) redirecting the pawn_def to point at human meat/skin as it's products, is there a way to add the effects of butchering, eating, making hats out of humans to non-human creatures? For example, the quasi-human mutants from the Rimsenal Ferals faction are described as malformed human clones, but nobody bats an eye about eating them. I'm personally working on adding some human mutants to the game, and would like to prevent them from being safely edible, but I don't see how I can do that. I'm also not sure that just assigning the human meat and skin as products would actually work, at least as far as butchering is concerned. Honestly, I can't even find where human meat is stored in the documentation, but obviously it's special where most other meat is just meat with a name label attached to it.

So, I'm fairly new to Rimworld, but not to modding XML. I have a few questions I can't find answers for, and I guess I finally decided to just ask here.

I've been playing with two particular mods that have inspired me to jump in and make some custom critters; Biomes: Caaverns, and the Animal Collab Project. Studying what they've done and how they've done it has already gotten me some of what I want, but what I'm hoping to make, ultimately, is something that doesn't quite exist in either of those, or in the base game. I'd like to make a few creatures that reproduce asexually, like a giant ameoba, and a fungus-based animal, but I can't figure out how to accomplish that.

Every pawn race has the male/female dichotomy, and even if I knew where that was stored in the files, I'm not sure how I would to remove it or add additional possibilities, and I'm certainly not sure how I would make any creature reference a "third" gender as opposed to or in addition to, the male/female.

My only real idea is to make a male and female version of the creature that are identical, but A: they would still show the label male or female, B. I would still need one of each to allow them to reproduce, and C. I don't know if it's possible to make them both capable of laying eggs, giving birth, or producing resources from the "milk" template, all of which seem to be attached only to the female designation somehow. I'm worried that even if I figured out how, the best I'd be able to do is modify that to make ALL animals disregard gender restrictions on reproduction and resource generation.

Are there any thoughts on this? Or maybe examples from mods I don't know about that could serve as a template?

My other question is just is it possible to add additional copies of a creature, like the color variations of some animals in the collab project, but with actually different mechanics? I haven't looked at all of them, so apologies if there's already examples of that in the mod. I'm just talking about like, a variant of an animal, like a sheep maybe, but with/without horns, or a lizard that has venomous and non-venomous phenotypes. The idea would be to make different types of the giant amoebas, maybe some that explode like boomalopes, or some with some kind of electrical attack, or a poisonous gas on death. Ideally they would be able to freely interbreed with other sheep/amoebas/whatevers even with the different phenotypes, and the offspring would have a chance of coming out with any of the available phenotypes for that animal.