TUTORIAL MC - Mod Start to Finish 1

Here I am again, it's warm enough to be out of the bed without freezing me bollocks, so I can go on with my Tutorial series dedicated to MC.

Last time we opened one of my mods to give a look to the logic behind, and we saw that it's really not that complicated at all.

We'll now start recreating that same mod in the Constructor, and, as we saw, we only really need few things to make it work. This will be a 2 parts tutorial, and we'll stop after the first part to break down an interaction tuning, because interaction are complicated and we didn't look into them yet.

Anyway, I'll not cover the basis on the interface of MC since we already gave it a look. Let's open MC and make a new mod:

As a first thing, we'll need to add an element: trait

I'm making the trait that allows to disable/enable the autonomy for a single sim. The trait the Constructor give us is a Personality trait by default.

We don't need a Personality trait, we need a Hidden one, so we need to delete the component Personality trait, and add a component Hidden, instead:

Like this:

That's all for the trait, MC already sorted the name for us. You may want to fix the ages the trait can be given to, but apart from that, our trait is done. The Constructor also made for us a Core Buff, and we really need it:

So, I'm going to click on Open Element: Value at the bottom:

And this is my buff! Currently, it only has a name. I need it to have more than this, specifically, I need a Game Effects Modifier:

The Constructor may not give me the possibility to add exactly the components I need... let's give it a look...

In fact, no... the tuning I need is not here... so, how can I solve this problem? There are two ways:

1. Add the tuning I need manually once exported the mod;

2. And I suggest you to use this method, so you'll not have to manually fix the mod every time you need to update it: MC has the option to add a component Custom Tuning:

What's that? A component where I can write down my own tuning:

Clearly I need to manually write down the tuning in question by looking at Maxis ones, and I need the full tuning of the Game Effect Modifier in this case:

But doing this will save my arse in case I'll need to change something in the mod. We covered the various tunings a buff can take in another tutorial, as we covered how to add the components MC allows us to add to a buff.

That's all for the buff. We now need to add a new element to the mod, specifically a loot:

The new element loot will be empty:

We need this loot to give the trait to sims. And we'll need a second loot to remove the trait when we want to toggle the autonomy on again. 

Notice: the subject of the loot in my mod is TargetSim, not Actor. Actor would work just fine the same, but when I did the mod, I set the interaction in a way that it can be activated also on sims that are not the currently active sim, so the subject is always TargetSim, and I'll stick to it. The difference will be all in the Global Test of the interaction.

Back to MC, in our loot we need the component Add trait:

Here we need to fix the Participant (TargetSim) and the Reference Type (the trait we want to add, meaning the trait we made before):

The reference type, in this case, is an Existing Element.

We need a second loot, this time with the component Remove Trait, everything else is the same:

In my mod I also have a Pie Menu Category, where my interaction will show up in the menu... and they're not really complicated at all:

I'll add an element Pie Menu Category:

And it really only needs a component Name.

To recap, we have in our mod: 1 trait, 1 buff (that is not on the list, but it's associated to the trait), 2 loots and 1 Pie Menu Category:

So, technically... this mod is already functional to toggle the autonomy off and on, but there is no interface to make it work... there is no interaction... that's the thing we'll be doing in the next part. If you export the mod at this stage, you'll see that MC doesn't give you a Script. The moment we'll add the interaction, MC will also give us a Script to make the interaction appear in game... and that's all the script does (we'll test replacing the script MC gives us with the XML injector, later)