Tutorial:Inspecting a live mod
Introduction
Welcome to the Inspecting-a-live-mod tutorial!
In this tutorial I will take you on an annotated tour of my mod Eradicator's Hand Crank Generator Deluxe. That's a rather long name so I'll often call it just HCG hereafter. Hand Crank Generator is a fully functional mod that you can download and play with right now! It has extensive comments in the code to explain how and why it works.
This tutorial assumes that you already know how LUA works and that you have have familiarized yourself with at least the basic concepts of Factorio modding. On that basis it aims to provide a rough overview on how real-life mods work. And shows you how to assemble the theoretical concepts you have learned so far into a working whole. If you want to give yourself a real challenge you can of course try to read this without any prior knowledge and try to learn on-the-go.
First settings.lua shows creation of some basic setting prototypes. Then data.lua covers most basic operations like creating new item,
recipe, building and technology prototypes. And how to interact with
prototypes of other mods. Finally in control.lua I explain how
to make custom behavior for buildings - namely how to make the
Hand Crank Generator produce power when the player presses a key on the keyboard.
You can read the files on the web on GitHub or download and extract the mod locally to your harddrive.
Tutorial
I recommend reading in the order that the files are loaded by the game. Have fun!
Chapter 1 : settings.lua Chapter 2 : data.lua Bonus Chapter : migration.json Chapter 3 : control.lua
Links
HCG is available in full on GitHub or on the Factorio Mod Portal.
Abstract Draft
(For later use in Tutorial:Modding_tutorial)
Inspecting a live mod — An annotated tour of a mod that is live on the mod portal right now.