Modding Guide

This guide explains how to get started with creating a mod. If you simply want to learn how to install a mod, you should refer to Adding Mods.

Getting Started

Modding Requirements

  • Visual Studio Code
  • A working version of the Lethe Mod.
  • A dump of the game's static data.
    • How to access the game's static data
      1. Using the Lethe mod, open a modded Limbus Company process.
      2. Load into Limbus normally.
      3. When inside the main menu for Limbus, press 0. (Limbus will freeze for a short time, but do not log out.)
      4. After the process unfreezes, there will be a new folder, named dumpedData, which can be found in ...\BepInEx\plugins\Lethe\.

Recommendations

  • You can press 8 to reload the game whenever you make some changes.
  • Enabling the "Format on Save" setting in Visual Studio Code (this can be doing by going into the wheel icon at the bottom left --> Settings --> Search for "Format" --> Enable Format On Save). While not strictly neccesary for modding static data, it turns the nigh-unreadable (but compact) locale files into humanly readable localizations for us.
  • You will be dealing with many .json files are essentially a massive list, and I would highly recommend you use Visual Studio Code's built-in feature of closing down certain parts of your code (as seen in the image below). This is quite handy as it allows us to more easily grasp how personalities/skills/etc actually work. Everything is just another entry in a long "list".

File Structure

Almost everything you will do are done in the Lethe folder:

  • dumpedData contains static data dumped from the game directly. This gives you folders of vanilla data which you can use as templates to base your mods on.
  • mods contains all the mods. Create a folder at mods/my-own-mod (substitute my-own-mod with the name of your mod), and follow the guides above to start modding.
  • ModTemplate is a folder that gives you an idea of what should be inside mods/my-own-mod. You can copy ModTemplate to the mods/ folder and rename it to your mod's name to get started.

The mods folder should look something like this with different mods installed:

A General Guide To Finding Stuff

Modding can really be divided into 2 steps.

  • Step 1: Find the unmodified data we need and copy it.
  • Step 2: Paste this unmodified data into the right folders and begin to tinker with it.

Step 1 always takes place in 2 specific folders, those being limbus_data which contains all the static data that Limbus has (such as identity stats, skills, abnormalities, encounters, etc.), and limbus_locale which contains all the localization files that limbus uses. These folders can be found by going into path to limbuscompany\BepInEx\plugins\Lethe\..

This requires you to press the "0" key on your keyboard after having opened the game to dump all the static data and static locale. All the dumped static data should then end up in the dumpedData folder.

At it's very core all of this is extremely simple, but I'll be elaborating further on it in the threads.

Very Important Note!!!

Never, and I repeat, never copy and paste data from the folders in the dumpedData (or config) folder (such as encounters, identities, and skills) and then modify them. Always get your data from limbus_data and limbus_locale

While these folders are useful for quickly grabbing the data you need (such as a specific script), they have horrible formatting and generally mess up and crash your game for no reason; therefore, you should always copy and then modify data from the proper folders instead.