Battle Brothers Modding Documentation

    Environment Setup

    For beginning your BB modding journey I'd recommend this video tutorial by LordMidas. This will lead you through setting up a code editor (Sublime Text specifically) and explain some vanilla code structure and file decompilation.

    This video is starting to show its age a bit and you should do the following things differently:

    • Instead of installing the Squirrel package for Sublime Text manually, you should just follow the instructions for automatic installation here, to get the themes shown in the video, you have to manually install the Battle Brothers Snippets package
    • Rather than downloading Adam's tools or creating your own mod folder manually, you should set up Taro's BBBuilder, an outstanding command line tool, by following the readme at the link. It also has support for Visual Studio Code. If you do not do this you are massively wasting your time and will struggle to follow the rest of this page.

    BBbuilder

    To use BBbuilder, you must first download a release build from the GitHub, then unzip the BBbuilder.zip into a permanent folder. Finally, you should open up a command prompt or powershell window, navigate to the folder you unzipped BBbuilder into, and finally run .\BBbuilder.exewithout any additional arguments to get a good breakdown of its capabilities.

    Before beginning modding, I would strongly recommend downloading BBbuilder, creating a mod folder and setting up BBbuilder using

    .\BBbuilder.exe config datapath "path/to/battlebrothers/data"
.\BBbuilder.exe config modpath "path/to/folder/for/your/wip/mods"

    If you've already extracted your game files using bbbuilder's extract function, I'd recommend using

    .\BBbuilder.exe config folders "path/to/bb/decompiled/files"

    to automatically have it add that folder to your new projects.

    Each time you follow any of the first mod guides, create a new project using

    .\BBbuilder.exe init mod_my_cool_mod

    It is convention to prefix your mod folder (and mod ID) with mod_ and use snake_case.

    This will create a new folder called mod_my_cool_mod in the folder you passed to config modpath, create a nice folder structure for you and even create a basic file to get you started with mod_hooks and MSU. If you're using Sublime Text you should be able to open the mod_my_cool_mod.sublime-project file and have your environment already configured for you.