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[In the end I think it's this interaction between streamer-modder donation money that would require more research before diving into such a project.]

Well, the way you are looking at it, Any twitch broadcaster/ Youtube broadcaster would be doing this already...

As I said, this is not an area in which I have any specific knowledge.

(Frankly, the entire Internet subculture that's grown around the idea of sitting and watching videos of other people playing games makes absolutely no sense to me. If I'm interested in a game, I want to play it, not watch someone else play it.)

It's pretty much the same mentality as the hundreds of thousands of people sitting in their living room watching a game of football / soccer / ice hockey / basketball / baseball +++. They are not participating in the match so why would they watch someone else play instead of playing themselves?

• It's low-effort entertainment. Perhaps you are interested in playing a game but you don't have the energy to do so, you can watch someone else play and by extension you are experiencing the game. Where some people would kick back with a movie or a series, increasingly many are now opening a stream to watch instead. Additionally as we know with Rimworld, the difficult games tend to make the best stories, but not every player have the energy or willpower to play the really difficult games. In that case watching a streamer (with this energy and mentality) play through difficult games, you can experience the interesting stories and their enthusiasm will affect you.


• It's a sense of community. Just like in any sports with a fan-group the streamer will attract a group of viewers that are slowly gaining a sense of identity. You identify as a "fan of streamer XYZ", you will have a greater sense of commonality with other fans.


• It's a dialogue, not a monologue. Good streamers are interacting with their viewers and fans. As opposed to the soccer match where any amount of screaming into your TV in your living room will not have any impact on the match or players, in the case of streamer-viewer interaction you have the ability to speak with the streamer, affect the streamer, and thus the gameplay, and there is a sense of acknowledgment in being heard.
  

There is of course a lot of bad sides with this culture and some are particularly cringe-worthy but there are a market / demand for a mod increasing the interactivity the viewers have with the game of the streamer.

When it comes to donation, people are donating to the streamer for their content creation, pretty much regardless of what game they play. This is also not against any legal rules when it comes to Tynan and Rimworld (as far as I know. EA, Ubisoft, Activision ++ are all encouraging streaming of their games since for them it is free publicity and very good publicity at that.).
The more people playing Rimworld on streams + people watching such streams will drastically increase the sales and interest in Rimworld. Just look at how successful PLAYERUNKNOWN Battlegrounds is from a marketing point of view. They didn't pay for TV commercials and internet-banners. They gave the game for free to famous streamers, collectively having thousands of viewers across all of them and all the viewers wanted to also be like their favourite streamer and really good at that game, buying the game in the process. They have now sold over 8 million copies in 4-5 months and the game is still in early access.

When it comes to legal stuff I would rather focus my attention on who gets the money. The streamer or the modder? The viewers wanting to donate will be faced with their streamer's donate-button funneling money through either PayPal or directly through Twitch in the case of donating 'bits' (Twitch's internal currency) and into the streamers personal account.

I think making such a mod for free, not taking any cuts from the streamer's donations would be legally simple and pretty straightforward. Being a mod wanting to have a cut or sell the mod for a one-time fee would be more challenging and may be against Rimworld EULA and such.

Have we seen any other mod on the forum / workshop that you have to pay for to access?

In the end I think it's this interaction between streamer-modder donation money that would require more research before diving into such a project.

umm patch it out using the remove operation....look up patching, plenty of info around the forum.

It works and is probably the best way to do it when it comes to compatibility and future-proofing the mod itself, but it's not a completely clean solution. In this example I tried Patch-removing the default Bed and SleepingSpot:



While they are now successfully removed from the game, I'm getting the following errors:



I am not yet experienced enough to know if these errors are something that is going to come back and haunt me or something the game can live with. Will continue developing and see how it goes.

Also useful tool for testing xpath expressions:

https://www.freeformatter.com/xpath-tester.html

Yes, adding a 'unreachable' tech requirement seems to be the current best solution though there's still the research object visible from the game. I've tested and it works. However I am still interested in any alternative methods if anyone would have more insight on this topic.

why not "just" named your new items exactly like the vanilla one?

For the sake of consistency and clarification I would prefer all my new items having names like <MyMod_ItemName> and rather have a separate file containing names and code for the default items that I have hidden. This will keep them separate and allow greater control. That is the idea, anyhow.

If I take an example:
I would like to add more granularity when it comes to beds. I think the following would be confusing:

Code Select Expand

#pseudocode
<beds>
MyMod_PrimitiveBed -> DefaultBed -> MyMod_SomethingMoreElaborateBed -> RoyalBed
</beds>

and would prefer something like this, if possible:

Code Select Expand


#pseudocode
<beds>
MyMod_PrimitiveBed -> MyMod_BasicBed -> MyMod_SomethingMoreElaborateBed -> MyMod_VeryElaborateBed
</beds>
<hidden>
DefaultBed
RoyalBed
</hidden>

I'm trying to get into modding for the first time and wanted to rework a lot some of the basic items in the game like the default beds, default sleeping spots, default campfire +++.

In doing so I'm making new items within my mod but I would like to hide the default items so they are not visible / available to use from the get go (as they are today in the base game).

I managed to 'hide' them by creating a new empty def within my mod using the same <defName>, ParentName and <label> as the old default items and this successfully hides them from the game without critical Errors. However, the log reports the following errors: "Config error in Bed: Bed has null thingClass."

While I suspect I can solve some of it by adding a thingClass to the new empty def(at work, haven't tried yet), I am curious if there isn't a much better/proper way to disable/hide those items that I am overlooking?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!