Good habits/advice for rimworld modding?

[urumizawa]

There are a few things bothering me about the game which have not been made as mods for years, so might as well use them as an excuse to get into modding. shoutout to Jecrell and his amazing tutorial which I will be using to get started.

question is as said in the title about good practices in general that apply to rimworld.
My "question" is pretty vague but that is the only way I could formulate it, I apologize.

A couple of questions that are more specific regarding this topic:

• How do you handle modding without messing with your playthrough? is it as straightforward as I imagine? disable every mod besides the ones you will rely on for testing purposes, and when you want to play just load the mod list of the save file, restart and you are good to go? because having to wait 5-10 mins for the game to start every time is a huge pain
• And for testing? do you make a new game every time to avoid the issues that may come from using save files?

[pablo603]

I made a few small mods myself (nothing C# though, just XML) so I think I can answer your question, at least from the XML side.

I think it's generally a good idea to familiarize yourself with all the different files, which files are connected to (and depend on) other files and what you actually can put into the defs (you can for example make an item (for example steel) emit light, something that doesn't really happen in vanilla AFAIK)

How do you handle modding without messing with your playthrough? is it as straightforward as I imagine? disable every mod besides the ones you will rely on for testing purposes, and when you want to play just load the mod list of the save file, restart and you are good to go? because having to wait 5-10 mins for the game to start every time is a huge pain

Pretty much, yeah. I always deactivate the mods that I don't need and leave the ones that I do need and ones that help me with testing. I also leave my own mods (and some mods which I think could be incompatible) activated to make sure there are no incompatibilities between them. As you said, waiting 10 minutes for the game to load each time you make a change in your mods is indeed a pain and this is one way to reduce it. I even go as far as manually editing the file with activated mods to save the 10 minutes needed to deactivate them through rimworld itself.
It's located in

Code Select Expand

C:\Users\UsewrName\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\Config\ModsConfig.xml
I make a backup before editing so that I can also very easily activate all previous mods by just swapping the files.

And for testing? do you make a new game every time to avoid the issues that may come from using save files?

I do (sort of), but never really thought about avoiding issues coming from using save files. Even though I don't need to use HugsLib for .xml mods, it has a very neat feature that can save your time while testing. If you have that mod activated and if you have the dev mode activated in-game as well, a new button pops up at the top even while you are still in the menu. It's a "Quickstart" button and it does exactly what it says. I attached an image below with the location of the quickstart button as well as its menu.

[Canute]

At the dev tools you find more useful things after you did an autostart.