Core Concepts

This is the part of the docs worth understanding well. Once these pages click, every typed module is just a thin layer of convenience on top of what is here.

• The patch lifecycle is the one genuinely non-obvious topic: how passes and ordering buckets decide when your patch runs. Read this before you fight with ordering.

• Targeting assets covers labels and the Named and NotNamed filters that decide which assets a patch touches.

• The Do callback is where you actually change data, including how to delete an asset.

• Creating assets covers adding brand new content instead of editing existing content, including copying an asset with Duplicate.

• Features describes how to declare campaign features and how to gate patches, created assets and prefab patches on them. Your content is then only in the campaigns that enable it.

• Gates (Requires, Has, HasNo) skip a patch when its preconditions are not met and report the skip cleanly.

• Dependencies and ordering covers Needs, Conflicts, and the before and after relationships that let patches coexist.

• Working with JSON covers the JSON value you are handed, the methods on it, and the J helpers for the cases plain Lua tables cannot express.

• Config integration describes the settings of your mod and the relation between settings and patches.

• Reading the summary is how you debug: where to find what ran, what was skipped, and what errored, plus logging from a patch with the Log global for the cases the summary cannot cover.