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Writing Mods

Modding Tiny Tina's Wonderlands works basically identically to Borderlands 3: an application such as B3HM or OpenHotfixLoader is used to inject hotfixes into the game, making use of Gearbox's hotfix system. Modders familiar with BL3 modding will find no real surprises here.

The main resource for getting used to writing these kind of hotfix mods is the main BLCMods Wiki. The Borderlands 3 information is almost entirely applicable to Wonderlands as well, but there's also a Wonderlands area where we'll be making notes of any Wonderlands-specific info that you might need to know.

Here's some of the main pages you'll want to look into:

  • Accessing BL3 Data - Since we don't have something like BLCMM for Wonderlands modding, one of the bigger challenges is having game data to work with. This page details all of our currently-known ways of pulling information from the game, which will be a great help in figuring out what to change in the game. All the advice on this page is written wtih BL3 in mind but applies to Wonderlands exactly, too.
  • Borderlands 3 Hotfixes - For this style of modding, you're basically writing raw hotfixes, so knowing how they're laid out and how to read them is extremely useful. As with above, this info is BL3-specific but applies to Wonderlands as well.
  • Borderlands 3 Hotfix Modding - This page is a primer for getting used to writing BL3 hotfixes. This page is, unfortunately, written mostly from the perspective of someone who's already familiar with BL2/TPS modding. This page goes into some detail about some of the differences between modding in BL2/TPS and BL3. As before, this applies to Wonderlands as well.

One invaluable resource to look at, of course, is existing hotfixes. There's a few places to look to take a look at those:

  • This repository contains a lot of known-working examples
  • Gearbox's official hotfixes have been being collected since very shortly after the game launch, at the wlhotfixes repo.

Constructing Mods With Code

BL2/TPS modding is able to make use of BLCMM to simplify things and catch common errors, but we don't have something like that for WL Hotfix Modding yet. One way to make modding easier is to use programming languages to help you construct the mod files. This repo includes some Python-based scripts which serves to do that. Practically all of Apocalyptech's mods in here were constructed using these modules.

Using them does require that you install Python on your system, and get used to working in the language, but it avoids having to worry about fiddly hotfix syntax and lets you focus on just writing the hotfixes. Take, for example, this hotfix from Apocalyptech's BL3 Better Loot, which increases eridium drop chances from standard enemies:

SparkCharacterLoadedEntry,(1,1,0,MatchAll),/Game/GameData/Loot/ItemPools/ItemPoolList_StandardEnemyGunsandGear.ItemPoolList_StandardEnemyGunsandGear,ItemPools[10].PoolProbability,0,,(BaseValueConstant=0.8,DataTableValue=(DataTable=None,RowName="",ValueName=""),BaseValueAttribute=None,AttributeInitializer=None,BaseValueScale=1)

There's a lot going on there, with weird syntax, parentheses you have to keep track of, and for it to be a valid hotfix you can't make use of whitespace to make it any clearer. Writing the hotfix with code, however, lets you do this, instead:

mod.reg_hotfix(Mod.CHAR, 'MatchAll',
    '/Game/GameData/Loot/ItemPools/ItemPoolList_StandardEnemyGunsandGear',
    'ItemPools[10].PoolProbability',
    """
    (
        BaseValueConstant=0.8,
        DataTableValue=(
            DataTable=None,
            RowName="",
            ValueName=""),
        BaseValueAttribute=None,
        AttributeInitializer=None,
        BaseValueScale=1
    )
    """)

And then the mod-helper framework will convert that into a proper hotfix for you, and you can edit it in a much more intuitive way.

These helpers (and a few more examples of how to use them) can be found in the python_mod_helpers directory, and plenty of examples of using it in "real life" can be found throughout Apocalyptech's mod directory.

The code in python_mod_helpers dir is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 or later.

Contributing

If you've ever submitted mods to the BL2/TPS/BL3 github areas, you already know how to do so for this repo, because the procedure is identical. You can find instructions for how to do so at the BLCMods Wiki.

If you want your mods to show up on the Wonderlands ModCabinet wiki, which is the easiest way for users to find mods through github, you'll want to make sure to follow the ModCabinet wiki guidelines as well. The most important parts are to make sure your mod file has a .wlhotfix extension, and contain @title and @categories headers at the top of the mod file.