How to use Gremlins, Inc. Workshop

The goal of this guide is to provide detailed information about the use of Gremlins, Inc. Workshop, what options it opens and what limitation has.

Workshop launch

First thing you need to do is open Workshop window. To do this press the corresponding button in the main menu:



First screen you see after the launch is not for editing. Instead, you can see here three different pages with the lists of mods.

Page “All mods”

This page opens by default and shows all published mods created by you or other players:



Drop-down menu here allows to sort the mods by their type (single-player, multiplayer, challenge). By default it shows all mods.

If you select any mod, in the right half of the window you’ll see all important information about it: author’s name, short and full description of what this mod does, how it changes the rules, resources of the players, how many cards available in the deck and what those cards are, etc.

You can start a session with the selected mod directly from this screen if you wish, or subscribe to it. If it is your own mod you can also delete or start to edit it from here.

Important notes: even if a mod is created for multiplayer you can launch it anyway, but the session will be started immediately and all your opponents are going to be bots. If you want to try this mode with real players, create a session in the multiplayer lobby and load the mod from there.

You don’t need to subscribe to any mod if you want to use it. In Gremlins, Inc. You can consider subscribed mods as your “favorite”. They will be gathered at a separate page from where you can have quick access to them.

Page “My mods”

This page shows only the mods that were created by you. If you created a mod without publishing it, you can find it here and no one else will have access to it. Although if you start a new multiplayer session and load this mod, all other players in that session will play by the rules of your mod even if they can’t see it in the list of all mods, and can’t subscribe to it.

Page “Subscribed mods”

As was mentioned before, Gremlins, Inc.’s Workshop works in a way that you don’t need to subscribe to a mod in order to use it in your sessions. Instead it gives you a quick access to the mods that you like because the only mods you will see here are the mods you subscribed to.

Mod Editor

At the bottom of the Workshop window you can see a wonderful button “Create new mod” which allows you… that’s right, it allows you to create your own mod! Pressing it opens a new window where you can edit gameplay rules, characters and the deck.



Rules

1) Name: the name of your mod. Without a name the mod can’t be saved. Name should have between 1 and 128 characters.

2) Language: the language in which the description of the mod is written. Doesn’t change the mod in any way, but helps with the filtering in Steam.

3) Short and full descriptions of the mod: short describes the mod in a couple of lines, just to give an overall idea of what it is. It can be up to 255 characters long. In full description you can provide all details about the changes that your mod make to the game. Full description might be up to 8.000 characters long.

4) Mod type: you can create mods for the single-player and multiplayer modes, as well as your own Challenges with the additional set of goals. For the purpose of testing you can launch any mod in single-player with bots replacing the actual players, but when you load a mod properly through the lobby of your session, you won’t be able to load a multiplayer mod for the single-player sessions and vice versa.

5) Goal: goal might be the same as in the usual lobby. The main difference here is that for the mod you can set much wider diapason of number for the points/rounds/minutes needed to finish a session – anything between 1 and 9.999. Be careful with this higher numbers, a session that goes for 166 hours might be less fun than it sounds in theory.

6) Special rules: currently the game has two additional special rules:
6.1) Gold Rush: at the beginning of each turn players get +$30;
6.2) A Box of Secret: at the beginning of each turn players choose one of three cards that they will get instead of the one they use to move.

Of course these rules are optional and you can have a mod without them.

7) Settings for the turn time limit, character selection, special character abilities, and Chaos cards are identical for those that you set when you create a usual session. Currently the game has no option to create mods for the Team mode, but it might be added in the future updates.

8) Additional game goal: if you create a Challenge, in addition to all mentioned settings you have to set three more goals that depend on what the main goal is.

If the main goal is to get X number of points than in additional goals you should set how many rounds the player has to finish your mod with 1, 2, or 3 lamps alight.

If the main goal is to play for X rounds or minutes, then you should set how many points the player should have at the end of session to complete your challenge with 1, 2, or 3 lamps alight.

Important note: settings from Workshop have higher priority than the same settings in a lobby. When you load a mod in your lobby, all its settings will be overwritten by the settings from the mod and the session will be played by the new rules.

Player settings

Here you can edit everything related to the starting situation of each character in your mod. Starting from left to right you can change:



2) Player type: human (only if you create a multiplayer mod), bot (with two difficulty settings), closed slot (if you don’t need six players in the sessions).

2) Character choice: you can choose what character will be used by the player in that slot. It can be a specific character from the twelve available in the game or a random one.

3-6) 36) Initial points, money, votes, and Malice. You can give to any character in your mod up to 9.999 each of these resources.

7) Initial cards: yes, you can edit what cards players will have in their hand at the beginning of the session. Keep in mind that the game doesn’t check if there are enough cards in the deck to actually provide that number of copies to the player. It simply puts all corresponding cards from the deck to the player’s hand and if they need more, more copies will be created from a “thin air” than later will be returned to the actual deck used during the session.

Let’s say you decided to give a player 6 copies of “A Day at the Office”. After the player uses them all, your deck will have 6 copies of that card (assuming you didn't give more copies to other players and didn't change the deck).

Important note: in a player’s hand can be added only the cards that have at least one copy in the deck. If you edited the deck so there are 0 copies of a card (let’s again say it’s “A Day at the Office”) you won’t be able to add “A Day at the Office” to the hand of any player. If “A Day at the Office” was already there, it will be removed.

8) Initial permanent cards: similar to the cards in the hand, you can edit what active permanent cards a player will have from the beginning of session. The rule here is similar – you can give a player up to 3 active permanent cards, but only if at least one copy of such card exists in the deck. And if \ when the active copies are destroyed they will return to the main deck.

Important note: because mods literally change the core mechanics of the game, making possible to create situations that was not possible to foresee during the process of creation of the game, some of the changes might have unpredictable effects. As an example, you can give 3 active copies of “The Recycler” to a player and their effect will be cumulative – every time an opponent visits the Dump, they pay to the owner of the Recyclers $120. But effect of “The Accelerator” doesn’t work this way – even if you have 3 active Accelerators, you can play only 1 additional cards at any spot. This isn’t a bug, this is unpredictable reaction to the messing with the core gameplay mechanics.

But despite that this option opens some interesting ways to mod the rules of the game. As an example you can give to all players in the session a copy of “The Automated Helper” and remove all copies of “A Tribute to Chaos”, “The Runner Bomb”, and “A Confiscation” from the deck. As the result, each player will get a guaranteed chance to change 1 card in their hand each time they have nothing to play on a spot.

9) Starting location: want to put Banker in the Jail, and Politician on the Dump? Or maybe you want that all six players have started from the Inferno? Mods allow to do that.



Keep in mind that the location on the left means “default” for that character starting position, and the location on the right means not any Misfortune spot on the field, but the one in the center, where the Secret Agent starts the game.

Deck builder

Here you can edit one of the most important aspects of the game – the deck. By the most part this screen provides data that helps you to analyze the ratio of the different types of cards to each other.



1) Cards: this is the list of all cards that are exist in the game. Their names, move points, and the number of copies in the current deck. You can choose any card by clicking on it, and change the number of copies by clicking on the arrows placed left and right from the numer. For any card you can have from 0 to 100 copies in the deck, but if you really want to add 100 copies of a card it would be better to use another part of that screen.

2) Selected card: here you can see the illustration and description of the chosen card. Under it you also can change the number of copies of that card in the deck but here you can directly put the wanted number in the corresponding field.

3) Total number of cards: how many cards currently in the deck and what types the have.

4) Cards by move points: tired from the cards that have 3 move points? You can remove half of them from the deck (or all, if you wish).

5) Cards by location: here you can see how many cards in the current deck can be played in different locations.

Important note: deck should have at least 70 cards, otherwise you won’t be allowed to save it. But if you want, you can make so the all 70 cards would be the same.

Saving and publishing the mod

At the bottom of the editor you can see two buttons:

1) Save: at any point of editing you can save your mode and immediately test it (or continue editing later). If you don’t like your latest changes, just close Workshop without saving the mod. Next time you open it, it will be loaded in the last saved state.

Important note: saved but not published mod is visible only to its author.

2) Publish: by pressing this button you send your mod in the “big world”. It will become visible in Steam Workshop, and other players could try it in their sessions and give it a rate.

Important note: in order to publish your mod you should save it, and accept Steam Subscriber Agreement: http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/ (it will be suggested to you if you push the “Publish” button”).

Important conclusion: if you read carefully through the guide, you now know very well what you can achieve with Workshop and what possibility it opens to everyone. So it shouldn’t surprise you that in the sessions that use mods you can’t get achievements and chests. The ability to build a perfect deck for any goal could make both of these gameplay features meaningless if it would be allowed to use them together.

How to add a thumbnail to your mod

In order to add a thumbnail to a mod, you should make following steps:

1) you need to find the ID of your published mod. It always look like a set of numbers and you can do this in a few ways:

1.1) Open your mod's page in a browser – it's ID will be shown in the browser's adress bar.



1.2) Open the list of all your mods (open your profile screen -> Workshop Items) and click on the needed mod with the middle mouse button ("the wheel"). Information about the mod will be opened in a new window at the top of which you will see it's link with the ID.




1.3) If this is your first published mod then you can find the ID in the mods' local folder on your computer. The easiest way to find it is to open properties of the game in Steam -> "Local files" tab -> "Browse local files" button. All your published mods are saved here in individual folders. The names of the folders are the same as the ID's of the mods, and because you only have one mod at this point, you won't be able to make a mistake.

2) When you know the ID, the rest will be easy:

2.1) Find an appropriate image for your thumbnail. The image must be .jpg, with the recommended resolution of 512x512 pixels (square).

2.2) Change the name of the image so it would look like ХХХХХХХХ.jpg (where ХХХХХХХХ is the ID of your mod that you already have found – you only need the part with numbers).

2.3) Put this image in your mod's folder. Description of where to find it you can see above.

2.3) Publish your mode again. In order to do this you need to change something in the mod (1 letter in the description is enough).

If later you decide to change the picture, just follow the instruction and replace the old image with the new one, and publish the mod again.

[Dovahkiin]

I realized I couldn't use the workshop to customize my initial money.

[Qfasa]

Added instruction of how to add a thumbnail to your mod.

[Yangkai]

Well, it seems that only in the case when computer has low resolution can't see the input box.Maybe I should take back what I said just now.

[Qfasa]

@Yangkai you can not put any Chinese text in the box or you can't type in Chinese there? In first case you can try write your description somewhere else and then copy-paste it in the game.

[Yangkai]

I can not use the Chinese input method(I use google) to descride my mod in the game.I don't know why.