I started modding a couple of days ago and got an idea for a good mod. I think this could be possible to achive and would make the game more awesome. If you got more ideas or tips and tricks to convert my plans, please let me know! I'm still in the process of completely understanding lua and the capabilities of it. If you got experience with modding please teach me senpai (i got a lot of questions, that i would otherwise have to solve with trial and error)! Vision: I want to make a mod, that implements better/alternative colonies. I want to give the player the ability to establish colonies, which would be able to trade with other player established colonies across systems and grow autonomously (the new buildings and npcs spawn by themselves when the world is visited). The player could visit them, give them money or resources to help them grow, or collect taxes. Colonies could be established with different focal points (mining, farming, trading, military etc.). The player would get quests that tells him to defend a colony or help them out with resources. A colony could become hostile and affect other colonies and trigger a chain reaction. Every colony simulates tradingships (colonies with trading focal point would have more ships) and after too many colonies an administrative colony would be necessary to prevent revolts. Technical: The growing and trading between colonies could be calculated in a player script, which also triggers quests, events, etc. To start a colony, you place a special object at a planet, which builds a starting building and spawns a major-npc (or you must choose a crewmember for that). The placed object defines the colonytype. Speaking with the major could change the taxes. When the player visits, the tax would spawn in a box near the colonyobject or inside the object itself and the colonyobject would spawn new buildings and npcs according to the growth calculated in the player script. The buildings would be modular and prebuild (similar to dungeons) and stored in script files /config. (the best/easiest solution i could think of is: to construct the colony buildings in game, scan them, read the data from log and write the data in the mod scripts) What i currently got: An object capable of building stuff from its config data An object capable of scanning a building (tiles + objects) that spawns an item which builds the scanned building and/or writes the data in the log file
