MODDING.txt

MODDING

Certain features of the game can be modified without rebuilding the game from
source code; you should be able to just modify the pertinent files and run the
game to see your changes.  This attempts to document these features.

An in-depth review of all json files and their appropriate fields is avaliable in
JSON_INFO.txt.

1) Adding a profession.
Let's say we want to add a survivalist profession; this profession represents a
character who was already living off the land before the disaster struck.  We'll
say this profession starts with archery, survival, traps, beef jerky 
and a few survival items.  We'll set the starting cost at 3 points since
it modifies skills and items.  We could do that with the 
following entries:
   {
      "ident" : "survivalist"
      "name": "Wilderness Survivalist",
      "description": "You live off the wild and wander the world; you've never
                      had\na place to live or items other than what you can
                      scavenge off the land.  People called you crazy; now,
                      after the disaster, you're the sane one."

      "points" : 3,
      "items": ["pants_cargo", "boots", "beltrig", "selfbow", "jerky", "arrow_field_point"],

     "skills" : [
         {
            "name": "archery",
            "level" : 1
         },
         {
            "name" : "survival",
            "level" : 1 
         },
         {
            "name" : "traps",
            "level" : 1
         }
     ]
   },

After adding this to the professions.json file, we should see the new profession
show up in the character creation screen.

2) Adding an item
 1)  Open the appropriate json in data/raw/items and add your item near similar types.
 1b) See JSON_INFO for a more in-depth review of each individual item .json file/flags
 2)  Add the item to item_groups.json to have it spawn in in-game locations

3) IMPORTANT NOTE on JSON FILES:
The following characters: [ { , } ] : "
are *very* important when adding or modifying the JSON files for technical 
reasons.  This means a single missing , or [ or } can be the difference between
a working file and a hanging game at startup.  Many editors have features
that let you track { [ and ] } to see if they're balanced (ie, have a matching
opposite); Notepad++ is a popular, free editor on Windows that contains
this feature.  On Linux, there are a plethora of options, and you probably
already have a preferred one  :-).