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Foundation

A New Era of Organic City-Building Simulation!

Modding Mondays Episode 6: A Farmer’s Life

Welcome back to yet another episode in our Modding Mondays series! 

It’s already been a month since we last featured a popular fan-made mod here. 

Today, we have the pleasure of talking about the Vegetable and Poultry Farms mod from creator Batyushki, whom you may remember from the Security mod we shared not so long ago.

Immersion is an important part of gaming: feeling like you’re part of the world and, to an extent, being able to engage in role-playing. 

One way to achieve a greater level of immersion is by adding gameplay features that feel relevant without bloating what’s already in place. With Vegetable and Poultry Farms, Batyushki had two goals in mind: to add variety and a more realistic food supply for villages. 

This was one of the first mods that I designed. I am a hobby farmer in real life and wanted to add some basic foods to the game. The mod has been through many versions and I’ve slowly improved and simplified it over time

-Batyushki

Agriculture and farming in the Medieval age were critically important: most peasants worked the land and played a key role in the production chain.

This mod introduces two major gameplay additions to Foundation. The first one, a poultry farm, is unlocked once you get 10 villagers. Once it has been built, you will be spawn chickens and geese (they respawn every two weeks).

Chickens produce eggs and poultry. The former is faster, but trades for less gold. On the other hand, geese, duck ponds and dovecotes produce only poultry. You want to keep that in mind once you start building your new poultry farms!

Additionally—and this is a nice touch—you collect dung from your animals using the dung heap. You can then turn dung into compost to grow your vegetables. The circle of life!

The other major inclusion from Batyushki’s mod are the vegetable farms. Unlocked once you get 20 villagers, you can build them according to your own taste just like wheat farms (by snapping together building parts in free-form) or use the simple, fixed farms.

The free-form farm requires both field workers and a processing worker, but produces more per acre of land than the simple field farms. Once you build a free-form farm you need to select which vegetable to grow, and paint the crop field.

Here’s a list of available vegetables:

  • Beets
  • Cabbage
  • Beans
  • Broccoli

Vegetables require compost (see above) and water to grow. Once you have vegetables ready for trade and stocked in a granary, you can add them to the vegetable cart, which acts as a market tender.

Creating the Vegetable and Poultry farm mod proved to be quite challenging. With a lot of hard work and the help of a fellow modder, Batyushki was able to see its completion:

One challenge with the mod was how to make the chickens and geese move. I knew this was technically possible but I didn’t know how to go about it. A fellow modder, Minotorious, created code that other modders can use to do simple movement animations. So in the end I didn’t have to solve the problem myself but was able to leverage the code Minotorious developed. I’m looking forward to many more collaborations with other modders going forward.

-Batyushki

We are always humbled to see such amazing content created for Foundation. The modding community is truly astonishing and we know it’s only going to get better as the game further evolves.

Download the Vegetable and Poultry mod now!

 

Modding Mondays Episode 5 : House Additions V4

Hello everyone!

This week, we’re back with a fifth episode in our Modding Mondays series.

Foundation is a medieval city building game. Therefore, its buildings are at the heart of the gameplay. We can think of them as characters for the game who are all working together to give it a unique identity.

Something that truly inspired Vjraymon, a former IT professional who discovered his passion for modding through a co-worker. With House Addition V4, his goal was to offer more variety with Foundation’s architecture.

Modding new buildings for a city builder seemed like a no-brainer. I first added them to the so-called organic house system of the game, then I took inspiration from the Vanioville mod created by Arthas to populate them manually.

-Vjraymon

Here’s what the mod has to offer in terms of new possibilities for residential zoning:

  • Green house (4 slots)
  • Red Wine House (6 slots)
  • Red House (6 slots)
  • Charcoal House (6 slots)
  • Two Stories Charcoal House (8 slots)
  • One Story Red House (6 slots)
  • Yellow House (6 slots)

Another mod from Vjraymon allows you to manually place the new houses in your village, which is very interesting. As a reminder, Foundation villagers build houses by themselves in residential painted areas on your territory. The end result is entirely organic.

Like others before him, Vjraymon learned how to code mostly on his own, but also with the help of the community and developers here at Polymorph Games.

I learned to code in Lua with Foundation. At the beginning, I used examples provided with the game in addition to the help of Maxime and the modder Helron.

-Vjraymon

Today, this creator has more than 20 mods to his name. His biggest wish for the future of modding with Foundation? Being able to mod character animations beyond what we currently offer, i.e. move, rotate and scale.

Download House Addition V4 now!

 

Modding Mondays Episode 4: Crime & Punishment with the Security mod

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!

Download the Security mod today!

 

Modding Mondays Episode 3: Day – Night Cycle

Hello builders and welcome to this third episode of our Modding Mondays series

Today we have the pleasure of showing off the very fresh Day – Night Cycle mod from Minotorious. 

If you’ve been hanging around on our Discord, you know just how involved Minotorious is in the community. With more than 10 mods under his belt, we felt like it was time to share one of his own creations here.

Adding even more immersion to Foundation

The Day – Night Cycle mod adds a new and immersive gameplay feature to Foundation. By using a sundial (see below), you’re able to adjust various settings:

  • Turn the sun on or off
  • Set the camera shader
  • Set the shadow direction (default: 12 o’clock direction)
  • Set whether you want dynamic simulation or not
  • Set the dynamic simulation’s speed

The sundial needs to be built like any other building in Foundation. Keep in mind that in order to use the Day – Night cycle mod, you’ll need to install the Foundation Extended Building Functions dependency, also from Minotorious. 

If you’d rather not toy with all these settings, you can instead install the automatic version which does the same thing only, well, without your input!

As is often the case with original creations, the Day – Night Cycle mod happened a bit randomly:

The Day – Night Cycle mod was more of a happy accident than something actually planned. I was checking what objects I could access inside the game that the developers had not exposed to modding yet when at some point I came across the game’s Sun. From that point on I made a little plan on how to implement the Day – Night Cycle and got to work. A few workarounds and 1-2 days later the mod and the little sundial controller started taking shape.

-Minotorious
The Day – Night Cycle mod in action

Empowering modders since day one

From the beginning, we’ve believed in community-driven content for Foundation. In fact, it’s a must for this type of game, as it adds a ton of creativity and replay value. As we’ve said in the past, we want our players to be able to let their creativity free and for them to have a platform with which they can share that creativity with the world. All of that begins with mod support.

That being said, we took the opportunity to ask Minotorious how his experience been like creating mods with Foundation.

With one word, amazing! Foundation is so simple to mod but also has so much depth if someone wishes to create something very new and very custom in it. Polymorph Games and especially Léo and Maxime are always eager to answer questions and help modders bring their projects to life. To be honest, the Day – Night Cycle mod is a prime example of the dev team listening to the modding community and implementing features we asked for. Without them implementing some methods related to attach nodes so quickly the Day – Night Controller wouldn’t have been possible at all!

-Minotorious

Aspiring modders are welcome to join our community at any given time. We have channels dedicated to mod development where members share tips and tricks along the way. Take a look, it’s worth it!

Download the Day – Night Cycle mod now!

 

Modding Mondays Episode 2: Livestock Farms

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode in our Modding Mondays series. This is our way of highlighting popular, must-see Foundation mods created by the community. 

This week, our focus shifts to Livestock Farms from longtime fan and creator Batyushki.

Foundation is all about creating your own, custom medieval village powered by efficient production lines. In the base game (i.e. the vanilla version) animals act as resource producers in the dairy and sheep farm production buildings. Same goes for fishes in the fisher’s hut. Only horses aren’t bred or hunted for precious resources (phew!).

With his mod, Batyushki expanded upon the idea of farming in Foundation. As per the mod’s official description, it “adds more livestock types and provides the opportunity to raise them intensively or on pastures, with more realistic food and space requirements. You can also fully utilise each animal for meat, milk or wool.”

In this case, Batyushki took an already existing concept and pushed its boundaries, allowing players even more freedom in how they combine farming with their animals. 

Instead of being limited to producing only one specific resource, most animals now produce at least two. Cattle generate meat or milk, whilst sheep yield either meat, milk or wool. This is also true for the newly added goat, which produces meat or milk. However, there’s one exception: the pig only generates meat—but at a faster pace than any other livestock.

Livestock Farms is all about giving you more flexibility to create believable farms in your Foundation village. One way to achieve this is with the rail fencing available from the walls menu. Newly added buildings such as the butcher’s shop, the creamery and the chandlery all synergize very well to deliver a rich, fun experience. 

Livestock Farms is an excellent choice to bring more variety to the game and we can’t recommend it enough!

Download Livestock Farms now!

 

Modding Mondays Episode 1: Fantasy Decorations

Hello everyone and welcome to our new blog series focusing on popular mods created by the Foundation’s community!

Every Monday, we will share a must-see mod that sets itself apart. In case you didn’t know, Polymorph Games maintains a close relationship with the modding community. This is our way of saying thank you and exhibit some of the most amazing work done by fans.

For our very first episode, we are glad to feature Fantasy Decorations from modder RaisinMuffin.

At its heart, Foundation is a game about organic medieval city building and customization.

The Fantasy Decorations mod goes a long way in enabling even more creativity within your village. It adds well over 30 decoration elements, ranging from weapon racks, gravestones, siege weaponry (see above), weapon targets and furniture to organic elements such as flowers and animals.

The sheer variety of decorations included in this mod is stunning, to say the least.

As if it wasn’t enough, almost every single decoration has height scaling. In other words, you can place them anywhere you want on your map. Some of them can also be snapped together, which enables a number of new variations.

The mod also includes other interesting options, for example the ability to remove grass in three different sized circles, draggable fences or even an Edit mode where you can freely move and delete decorations… even after they’ve been placed!

Fantasy Decorations is an impressive package. It currently sits at #3 of the most downloaded Foundation mods with well over 100,000 downloads. It also has been upgraded to work with the latest version of the game (1.8).

Download the Fantasy Decorations mod

 

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