Thanks for the report. I couldn’t reproduce it, though. Could you send your recipes.json file or describe what you did?
So!
I wanted a rebar crossbow bolt, so I made the item by having it as an ammo type BOLT. Then I made up the stats and such and spawned it ingame with debug. Then I went back to catamodder to make the recipe with requiring:
rebar 10x
And you needed a hacksaw and a hammer to make it. Went back ingame to spawn them in and made a few. Worked fine! But I noticed that I had all recipes unlocked. I was lazy, so in new game I pressed the ‘play now’ button to spawn me in faster. I had no skill points in anything, a few random mutations, and a depressed moral from killing a school kids worth of zombies after raiding a school with my crossbow and bolts. Not sure it if that has to do with anything, though. I repeated it with a fresh download of the experimental (this was a few versions back, so yeah) 0.7.1-1524-g9cede61. The catamodder date was a bit old, too. Maybe… alpha ver 4? I’ll still upload my files if you want me to.
When can we expect the v0.8 compatible version of this?
I finished updating everything to 0.8 (hopefully) and uploaded a new version.
@FunsizeNinja - Sorry for the delay, it would be helpful if you could just post recipes.json in code tags if you still have one that causes the problem.
This should really be stickied so the newbies can jump right into modding 
It would be nice if you added some means of porting over raws from the previous version. Right now updating any large mod is a slow and painful process that takes me all day.
Also, the ability to rearrange the positions of items is a must.
Agreed.
*Gtaguy cancels everything: making mods.
[size=4pt]Oh god, it’s begun! The Gtaguy mod branch! Run for your LIVEEES![/size]
Haven’t been able to do much WRT adding extra support to CataModder, so the least I can do is grant a sticky
I just started playing with this today. I’ve noticed if I save it removes all skill requirements from recipes. Do I need to use the export function instead?
Ah, that must be the problem fishy mentioned a bit back. Thanks for noticing that the skills aren’t exported, I’ll see if I can do a quick fix for that. Even if you export your recipes, they probably won’t have the right skills - but at least you won’t mess up the rest of the file.
[quote=“asdfzxc, post:66, topic:2540”]It would be nice if you added some means of porting over raws from the previous version. Right now updating any large mod is a slow and painful process that takes me all day.
Also, the ability to rearrange the positions of items is a must.[/quote]
That’s a good idea. I don’t have a lot of development time to dedicate to this right now, but I’ll evaluate that and maybe at least try to support it for the next Cata version transition.
Fixed the recipe skill bug.
This has been added to the main website as currently the only option under “Tools & Utilities”.
The building editor is almost done though so hopefully that will come next.
So what all can we break horribly edit with this mod? Everything non-map?
Right now it supports items, recipes and item spawns. It’s eventually going to also support monsters, terrain types and possibly even vehicles.
Problem with downloading… When I go to download it, it just shows a 404 page. Help?
I broke the link on the first page. It should be okay now, or you can use this one:
http://www.brianmacintosh.com/projects/catamodder/CataclysmModder_r30.zip
I’m kinda shy with making introductions, but I’ll try anyways.
My name’s Harold, and I’ve just downloaded this program in hopes of making myself some custom guns and ammo. Problem is, I’ve never really done any modding or programming before whatsoever, so I have no idea where to start.
I hope it’s not too much to ask, but can I have some help? Being directed to some tutorials would be helpful, though I don’t know if I’ll be able to understand them with knowing next to nothing about modding and programming.
Well, the intent behind CataModder is to make it nice and easy to add new items to the game, so this is the right place! I’ll try to give you a full rundown of how it works here (probably other people would benefit from this, too):
Cataclysm’s item data is stored in files with the extension “.json”. They are located in the Cataclysm folder under “data/raw”.
These files just contain text that is formatted a certain way so the game can read it. You can even open the files in Notepad and see all the data. CataModder lets you open these files and edit this data without worrying about getting all the formatting right - it does that for you.
[hr]
To start, you run the program, then click “File->Open Raws”. The program will ask you to select a folder on your computer. Find the “Cataclysm/data/raw” folder I mentioned before. Select it and press okay.
CataModder loads all of the JSON files in that folder you selected. You can changed which of these files you’re looking at from the dropdown marked “File:” in the top-left (not to be confused with the File menu). It will probably say “bionics.json” to start. Guns are typically stored in the “items/ranged.json” file, so select that one. Note that there are a lot of other files, including others that start with “items/”, which contain the game’s other items (tools, armor, etc.), and you can edit these too using the same steps I give here.
Now, in box marked “Entries” on the left, you see a list of all the ranged items in the game. You’ll also see a lot of text fields and check boxes in the main part of the window. These display all of the information the game has to describe how a “gun” item works. When you select a different entry in the Entries box, you’ll see the info for that item instead.
There are a lot of numbers here, and even I don’t know exactly what they all do (though if you click on any of the numbers or boxes, you will see a short help text at the very bottom-left of the screen). Therefore, the best way to make a new gun is to start with a gun that’s already in the game that’s similar to the one you want to make.
For example, if I wanted to make a new pistol, I’d find a pistol (like, say, the Ruger Redhawk, listed in the Entries list as “ruger_redhawk”) and select it (you should see its information on the left). Then, press the “Duplicate” button at the bottom of the Entires box. This will create a brand new gun, and it will copy all of the information from the Ruger Redhawk into it. So now you have a new gun that’s identical to the Redhawk, but you can now change the name, description, and any of the other values you to make it into a brand new gun. I might change the name of mine to “BMac’s Awesome Pistol”. I’ll also change the “Id”, which is currently “ruger_redhawk1”, to something more relevant (like “bmac_pistol”). This text “bmac_pistol” will never appear in the game, but we will need to use it later to refer to our gun so the game knows which one we’re talking about.
Now click File->Save All to save your work. Next time you run the game, your item will be included.
[hr]
Unfortunately, if you stop here your new item will not actually spawn in the game, unless you give it to yourself with the Debug menu. This is because you need to add it to one of the lists the game uses to generate loot.
You can do this in CataModder by selecting the file “item_groups.json” in the File box. When you do this, you will now see a list of item groups in the entries box (it probably starts with “child_items”). Each of these “item groups” contains a list of items. When the game wants to create some loot, it looks at a particular one of these lists to choose which item to spawn. For example, in forests in Cataclysm, you often see sticks and rocks, and the occasional mushroom or berry. If you look at the list named “forest”, you can see these items listed.
So say I wanted my gun to spawn in houses. I see that there is an item group called “homeguns”, which are guns that can be sometimes found in houses (if you type “homeguns” in the box labeled “Quicksearch” above the Entries box, you can find it easily). I select that group, then press the “New” button on the right (not the button under the Entires box, which would create a new Item Group) to put a new item in that item group.
You’ll see that a new entry is added that says “null (0)”. You can edit this entry now using the two boxes below the Item Group list box. The one marked “Item Id” shows the id of the item you want to spawn. Note that this is not the name of your gun (“Ruger Redhawk”), but the id (“ruger_redhawk”). So I need to change it from “null” to my gun’s id (“bmac_pistol”). You’ll see another box that says “Frequency”. That controls how often your item will be used over other items in the list. If you leave it at zero, your item will never appear. I notice that most of the other pistols in the list have frequencies between 2 and 7. So I might give my gun a frequency of 5. If I gave it a frequency of 100, it would spawn very commonly wherever Cataclysm decided to spawn the “homeguns” loot group.
Now File->Save All again, and you just might find your gun in somebody’s house next time your generate a world.
This is a lot of text, I realize, and I apologize for the lack of pictures. Do ask away if you have any problems getting things to load or work!
Is this compatible with 0.9?