Getting Started

This page will outline how to get a working mod that will simply log a message to the console when the game starts.

For this guide we’ll assume you already have the Outer Wilds Mod Manager installed.

Choosing an IDE

An IDE will help provide the ability to create, edit, and build your mod.

The recommended IDE for modding is Visual Studio.

On Linux (or if you just don’t want to use Visual Studio), use the “Other Editors” tab to get instructions for a non-VS developer setup.

Head to the Visual Studio downloads page and select Community if asked what edition to install. After downloading and launching the installer, follow instructions until you reach this screen:

Select the module in the installer

We want the “Desktop development with .NET” module, this will provide us with the tools we need to build the mod.

After installing Visual Studio, launch it once and then close it, this will ensure certain files are generated.

Installing the Template

We provide a template to make creating mods easier, this template will handle renaming files and changing the manifest.

To install the template, open a terminal and run the following command:

dotnet new --install Bwc9876.OuterWildsModTemplate

This will give an output similar to this:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following template packages will be installed:
   Bwc9876.OuterWildsModTemplate

Success: Bwc9876.OuterWildsModTemplate::1.3.0 installed the following templates:
Template Name    Short Name     Language  Tags
---------------  -------------  --------  -------
Outer Wilds Mod  OuterWildsMod  [C#]      Library

Using the Template

This will depend on what editor you’re using

Visual Studio
Other Editors

Open Visual Studio and select “New Project” from the welcome screen. Then search “Outer Wilds” and the template should appear in the list.

Set the project name to the name of your mod, please note this should NOT have spaces or special characters in it. The standard casing for projects is PascalCase, which involves capitalizing the start of every word and removing spaces.

On the next screen, set the author name to the name you want to appear in the manager and on the website, this should also not contain spaces

Finally, click “Create Project”

You’ll need to create a project via the dotnet new CLI.

dotnet new sln --name MySolutionName
dotnet new OuterWildsMod -n MyProjectName --AuthorName MyName
dotnet sln add MyProjectName/

See the Outer Wilds Mod Template README for a list of options.

General Mod Layout

The general layout of an Outer Wilds mod is as follows:

DirectoryYourProjectName/
- default-config.json
- manifest.json
- YourProjectName.cs
- YourProjectName.csproj (Hidden in Visual Studio)

manifest.json

This file contains metadata about your mod, such as its name, author, and version.

YourProjectName.cs

This file should have been renamed to your project name, it acts as the entry point for the mod.

default-config.json

This file is used by OWML to generate the settings menu for your mod, we’ll go over it in another guide

YourProjectName.csproj

This file tells Visual Studio about your project, it determines stuff like dependencies and versions, you shouldn’t need to touch this. If you’re using Visual Studio, this file won’t be explicitly listed. Instead it will be the parent of all files in the project.

The ModBehaviour File

Double-click YourProjectName.cs, and it should open up in the main editor pane.

This file should contain a class that has the same name as your project and some methods within that class.

The class this class inherits from is ModBehaviour, which is a special MonoBehaviour that not only marks a class as the entry-point for a mod, but also provides various utilities and overridable methods.

We’ll focus on Start(). In this method we do two things:

We output a message to the console alerting the user that the mod has loaded
We subscribe to the scene loaded event to output a message to the log when the SolarSystem scene is loaded.

You may have noticed we use the ModHelper field to achieve console output, ModHelper is a collection of utilities your mod can use to do a variety of things. It’s covered in the “Mod Helper” section of the site.

Building The Mod

Visual Studio
Other Editors

Now that we know what the mod should do, let’s make sure it does it. Building your mod should be as simple as pressing “Solution -> Build Solution” in the menu bar

You should just be able to run dotnet build. If not try running dotnet restore first. You may need to get the Mono runtime.

Running The Mod

Now the mod should have appeared in your mod manager at the very bottom, notice how the download count is a dash.

Your mod should now be ready to run!

Click start game and wait for the title screen to load in. Now search your manager logs (there’s a search box) for a message along the lines of “My mod YourProjectName is loaded!”. This means your mod was loaded successfully! You can also try loading into the main game and checking the logs for another message from your mod.

Getting Line Numbers

If you want to know where errors are happening in your mod, you can download the Line Numbers mod to make error messages include them!

You must build your mod using the “Debug” release candidate for line numbers to appear.

Next Steps

You’ve successfully created and built your first Outer Wilds mod, moving forward may require a bit of knowledge in unity and will depend on what exactly you’re trying to do. You may want to read the following guides to get an idea of how to make your mod: