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. HCG is a fully functional mod that you can download from Factorio Mod Portal and play with right now! It has extensive comments in the code to explain how and why it works.

This is an advanced tutorial that 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 this tutorial 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 are not yet familiar with the basics, Gangsir's modding tutorial is a good starting point for learning them.

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 hard-drive.

Tutorial

I recommend reading in the order that the files are loaded by the game. Have fun!

1. Chapter 1  : settings.lua
2. Chapter 2  : data.lua
3. Bonus Chapter : migration.json
4. Chapter 3  : control.lua

See also

• Modding tutorial overview
• Prototype documentation
• Factorio runtime API documentation