EM - Metals | Rework Devlog #4

Hi there, folks! I am here to bring you another development update about the upcoming rework for Expanded Materials - Metals. This time will be short, but that doesn't mean I don't have some very interesting news to share with you.

So, what I have been working during these last weeks or so, is the most ambitious (and useful) feature of the new rework, which will not only make the gameplay much easier, but will also relieve me from 75% of the most tedious (and boring) part of developing any mod in the Expanded Materials series, which is patching.

The features I've been working on are the following: So as you may know, if you have taken a look at the development document, I will be adding some variations of steel (Mild Steel and Tempered Steel, to be precise), and the major problem with this is that while these resources can be easily used to make/build stuffed things, like furniture, weapons, etc. It is very annoying that sometimes you require a small amount of steel to build, say, a Research Table, and all you have is Mild Steel, or Tempered Steel, and you may wonder "Why can't I just build it with those instead? It's not that it changes much isn't it?".

Well, that's the main feature I'm adding. In order to be able to freely add more resources without the concern of knowing they will bloat the game and generate these kind of situations, I can just let the game know they're all interchangeable, right?

As you can see, there is a new option when selecting a blueprint, which lets you select the material you want to use to build it. This material does not refer to the stuff you select before, but instead it refers to those 30x Steel that is shown in the cost list as additional resources needed. By using a DefModExtension and some C# code, I managed to tell the game that Steel is interchangeable with Iron, Mild Steel and Tempered Steel, so...

You can select the resource to use before your pawns bring them to the structure. And as you can see, the resource changes accordingly.

It still has some bugs though, like for example this is giving an error with the Research Bench for some reason, even though its recipe uses the exact same things as the Stonecutter Table, but that's why this is a devlog, so I can show you the progress and you'll get to know what I am working in.

So that's all for now, people. I hope you enjoyed this small update and again, thank you eternally for the amazing support, see you next time or around my Discord server if you're there as well <3