I can't really find any 'tools' to help me mod...

[Jessi]

I immediately assumed after looking through the Rimworld core files, that these .xmls are a weird creation and I should hate them because I can see no texture files, which means they're contained within something that requires a weirder tool to un-contain them so I can edit them and put them back together, yes?

I want to make weapons and new factions. I cannot do this if I lack the tools. Searching finds me some strange things that take apart .dds and other things, but what do I need?

[nightblue]

I immediately assumed after looking through the Rimworld core files, that these .xmls are a weird creation and I should hate them because I can see no texture files, which means they're contained within something that requires a weirder tool to un-contain them so I can edit them and put them back together, yes?

I want to make weapons and new factions. I cannot do this if I lack the tools. Searching finds me some strange things that take apart .dds and other things, but what do I need?

On the wiki, there's a part mentioning extracting art/music assets.  You need to download the tool it asks for to extract the .dds from the asset file.  The tool's actually very straight-forward to use.

I'm really new to it myself and have no idea how to go about making new assets.  I'm sure someone here can help you

[Jaxxa]

The textures for the Base game are packaged up and as you have found you will need to unpack them if you want to modify them.

If you want to use the Base Textures as they are you can just use them in the package as they are.

If you are adding new textures they can just be used from the folder path without packaging them.

[1000101]

Also, if you are retexturing, you don't need to repack your new textures.  Just create the same directory structure.  The game takes loose files as preference over the asset packages.

[Jessi]

Alright then, another question for you lovely people.

I've got the images as tex and tex.dds files, now, I can open these easily, but I wonder why the feth there are two of each same image? Such as FireC.tex and FireC.tex_2?

Also what's up with backm.tex's? Like the beds having a rave-wannabe cousin and the bed is now neon green?

[ItchyFlea]

The textures with the m are mask textures. If a building is made from stuff, it'll try to take on the colour of that stuff. You can use mask textures to stop parts of your texture taking on that colour. Beds are a good example of the usage of mask textures. Only the ends of beds take on the colour of the material used to make them, while the rest stays the original colour.

Not sure if I explained the above correctly, it's 1:42am. Hopefully the above helps.