Hello everyone and welcome to this fourth episode of our Modding Mondays series.
This week, we’ll share the discovery of Batyuski’s Security mod. This prolific creator has been credited for over 60 mods and shows no signs of slowing down.
What exactly is the Security mod, anyway?
The main idea behind the Security mod is to add a new layer of realism to our city builder while beefing up its challenge.
At the time of writing, Foundation’s vanilla experience (i.e. without mods) does not offer crime in any form or fashion.
Batyuski took this opportunity to add a whole new dynamic to the game: players are now able to protect their village from outlaws and punish them accordingly.
I have a huge list of mod ideas and spend a lot of time thinking about ways to make Foundation more true to medieval life while also keeping it fun. Castles and security played a central role in medieval towns and I always wanted to make a mod to replicate both the visuals and the functionality of a castle, and to introduce some mild challenges to the game in the form of outlaws.
-Batyushki
How do you protect your village?
When playing with the Security mod, you will have access to new buildings once you reach a population of 20 villagers. The most important one is undoubtedly the Constable’s Keep, which includes a prison part where outlaws will eventually be housed before being released a week later, jobless and with the Newcomer rank.
The mod also adds guard towers. Guards assigned to them will patrol the surrounding streets: a powerful deterrent to crime! You are free to change their route with special arrows placed on your territory.
Each keep, tower, wall, barrier or guard adds to the overall sense of security in your village. It is therefore important to place them in strategic locations to prevent the crime rate from increasing.
At any time, you can check the security level of a given building by clicking on it:
- Green: fully protected
- Orange: prone to theft
- Red: might encourage new outlaws
Outlaws
If a workplace is located too far from the above-mentioned security buildings or patrol routes, after two weeks workers will be tempted to steal food, goods and gold.
When a villager commits a crime, he becomes an outlaw. But this is not the only factor that can make them fall to the dark side: being unemployed for more than two weeks can also be the spark that leads to crime.
In this mod, villagers turn Outlaw if they are unemployed for too long or work in an area with low security. Outlaws live in forest camps and come back to the town to steal from other villagers. The player can build keeps, towers, walls and gates to increase security. Guards capture outlaws and go out on missions to destroy outlaw camps.
The genesis of the Security mod… and its future!
Mods require a ton of preparation, testing and patience. This was certainly the case with Security.
In 2021, working with another modder, Minotorious, I learned more complex modding techniques, including behaviours (making villagers act in a certain way) and how to overlay information above buildings. These made possible my second Security mod which is now available at foundation.mod.io.
While we strive to create the best possible modding environment with Foundation, there are times when creators find themselves in a bind and have to really think outside the box.
One significant obstacle I faced was how to spawn Outlaw camps away from the village but in places that the outlaws could reach. By using a behavior script I was able to send an invisible pathfinder to potential locations, to verify that outlaws could get there without being blocked by water or mountains.
Other ideas will have to wait, despite all our best intentions:
There are still more things to be done for the Security mod, once Foundation releases a few new features to modders. One would be to improve the way the player can view the security of each building, similar to how they can now see residential desirability. Another would be to zoom in on an area where outlaws have stolen something, when the player clicks a theft notification.
To conclude, Batyushki looks forward to the future of Foundation’s modding:
Even with its current limitations I am delighted at how the mod has turned out and really enjoy building my own castles, seeing the guards go on patrol, and watching the outlaws travel through the forest to their camps. Someday I hope to have entire villages of outlaws, Robin Hood style, living their own lives in the forest.
Foundation is truly a unique game and an amazing platform for modders!