Modding question for hats

[spectrepaw]

Hello~ So I have been playing Rimworld for awhile and I love the game, but for the longest time I have been curious, if I could get into modding. I do completely admit I have no knowledge of how to mod and don't even know where to start, especially with starting with something like custom hats, so just curious. If I wanted to make a hat mostly for show (not giving it any bonus armor or what) how would I do that and what would be a good place to start?

[Master Bucketsmith]

Welcome! Glad to see you're interested in tinkering!
A simple piece of clothing should be an easy thing to start out with, though I've not modded clothing myself so I don't know if there's any catch.

Go to *\RimWorld\Mods\Core\Defs\ThingDefs_Misc and open Apparel_Hats.xml.
In there you'll see the XML ThingDefs that define the vanilla clothing by tags and values.
<defName>, <label> and <description> are what will tell you what it is.
Copy one of those to a new file, don't forget the encompassing tags;

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ThingDefs>

    [your copy here]

</ThingDefs>
If you see <ThingDef ParentName="HatMakeableBase"> it will mean it requires the base def called HatMakeableBase.
Always make sure you've got those parents/base defs copied in your mod somewhere!

Toy around with what you'd like to change in there and see how it turns out in-game.
Use the dev-mode in RimWorld so you can easily spawn the items, and related workbenches to test if you can make them okay.

Come back here and ask questions on specific things if you can't figure it out!