Modding

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File:Fff-18-entity-graph.jpg

'Diagram of entities' (objects on the map) class inheritance structure generated by doxygen. Taken From Friday Facts #18 http://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-18

Modding in Factorio allows for more content created by the community.

Getting started

A good overview is the list of mods or the Factorio forum.

A good starting point is also the modding-Help-Board. The community is always answering to concrete questions. Sometimes within minutes. Or you could try the Modding FAQ page.

The Official Lua API documentation is a great reference for understanding the Factorio functions and types in the game.

Licensing

With v0.11 all mods needs to have a license. If a mod has no license it is assumed to have the a creative commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

See also

• this forum article.

In this article the devs explain also, that the base-mod (which is part of Factorio) can be used to create new mods, but not used for "outside of Factorio domain".

• http://www.factorio.com/terms-of-service

Creating a scenario from a saved game (map)

An often asked question is how to make a scenario (something which can be edited in the map-editor) from a map: Factorio can convert them (see also this post):

./bin/prod/factorio --map2scenario mapfoo

More about the client parameters

Creating scenarios with the map-editor

Another first step is also making maps with the ingame editor. That stores the map as a scenario, which is just a directory on disk with some files in it. You can look into that files and try to understand, what they are for. Or you can read the following pages:

Overview

• Modding overview
• Prototype definitions
• Data.raw
• Lua events
• Lua objects
• Script interfaces
• Lua/Data Lifecycle
• Migration scripts
• Modding FAQ
• Modding Tutorial

Other interesting stuff

• Tutorial: Create graphics for your mod..., how to generate sprite maps