Welcome to Modding!

[TwoPointChizel]

Hi everyone,

We’re delighted to announce that we can now invite you to begin experimenting with modding in our live beta on Steam!

We have teamed up with mod.io who have also worked with over 120 other games to help support their communities with ever increasing levels of user generated content. Something we’re really excited about is that your mods will also be available to console players when we come out of beta!

How does it work?

If you sign up and create an account with mod.io, you can download the available mods right now!

For content creation, you will be able to do texture swaps which change things like the image on a poster, or you can fully replace the mesh (skin) of an item with something of your own. If you have a cool idea for a chair, go right ahead and swap your concept with one of our existing ones!

To do the most basic of mods, you can change our Geometric Canvas with a picture of your choice, like your favourite cat! All you need is a .JPG or .PNG (If possible, save your image as a .TGA which is preferred but not vital).

We have created a number of guides to help you on the journey and we hope that even a beginner will find that they can add some of their own content to the game.

Currently the focus is on items, but we have plans in the works to potentially include things like wallpaper/floor customisations too.

Best Practices, what makes a good mod?

Before we give you everything you need to get started here are some best practices to consider when making a mod. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense right now. It will after you get going:

- Try to base your mod on an item that makes sense. If you build a fireplace, it would look a bit strange if it had to be placed outside, or students try to sit on it because the item is based on a bench.

- Name your mod as uniquely as possible, and when you upload to mod.io, make sure the title is the same as the name of the item to avoid confusing users.

- Where possible, try to keep your meshes low poly, around the 2000 tri mark.

- Please don’t add a mod without a Sprite Atlas (icon). If you don’t do this, the item will look like the original when you search through the menu, meaning it can easily get lost!

- A basic mod folder in Unity should consist of: the Config File, a .FBX (Mesh) file, a Material, a Texture for said material, a Texture for the Sprite Atlas and The Sprite Atlas Config file.

- If you’re not familiar with design tools such as Blender (free) or Maya (paid sub), there are websites where users put free models up that you can download. Just be aware that they can be a mess!

- Try not to create items from other games/franchises because we may be forced to take them down.

- We’ll do what we can to help if you’re stuck, but modding is about the community. Join our Discord[discord.gg] and jump in. No question is silly or not worth asking.

- As we are in the early stages, you may see that some of the above best practices have not been followed, but that’s ok for now! The process is evolving and we’re hoping to get everything tidied up before going live. If you stick to these best practices with your additions, we’ll be in a great position.

- We also have a known issue where controller support is not fully functioning yet.

Getting started:

At this time, only picture and poster mods will work on Mac and Linux. We are working on getting the functionality for other items to work ASAP!

- You need to start by downloading Unity which is the game engine we use. Head over to mod.io and follow this guide[mod.io] which goes through the initial set up and has the links you need to do this.

For reference though, you can download Unity from here[unity3d.com] and the version you will need is 2020.3.25f1 (the archive will probably only show you 2020.3.25).

- After setting everything up, you’re ready to go! We recommend that you start with a texture swap which can be done using this guide.[mod.io]

- Once you’re comfortable, you can consider moving on to adding an item. This guide[mod.io] goes through how you would change our Peaceful Plant into something else.

- Lastly, have a read of this guide[mod.io], that gives a more in-depth look at what is currently possible. It also has the steps for adding a Sprite Atlas (icon) so make sure you read that part at the very least!

Have fun, we can’t wait to see what you create!

[weiss]

why not doing steam workshop? wouldnt that be way more effective?

[TwoPointChizel]

Hey Chiro!

Steam Workshop is awesome, but we wanted to make sure players across all platforms could access modding in Two Point Campus, rather than making it Steam specific. Mod.io enables both PC and consoles players to do this, which is why we made the decision to use it over Workshop.

Side note - this thread was meant to be locked as it's just an info post. So if you, or anyone else reading this has any follow up questions, please feel free to post a new thread in this section of the forum!

Thanks,

Chizel