LCGoldScrapMod

COMPANY-MANDATED MESSAGE:

Listen up, employees! The Company has very important news to share!

Due to a recent series of earthquakes across all moons, remnants of mining activities have shaken loose and revealed scrap items covered in a golden coating. The Company suspects excavators had found gold in the region, and celebrated the occasion by turning their wares into golden versions.

These golden variants are EXTREMELY VALUABLE, effectively doubling the selling value of the original item. So, needless to say, the Company expects ALL employees to return with as many of these golden items as possible. However, as an aside, our risk analysis team does stubbornly keep saying these golden items are also more dangerous, because the gold coating would make the items roughly 1.5 times heavier, and due to gold being a conductive metal, but do NOT let this deter you from your scrap-collecting contract!!

That is all for this message. We hope you stay a great asset to the Company.

The Mod

Introduction:

Ready to dive back into the facility to push for even higher quotas?

This mod adds 30 rare gold versions of scrap that greatly reward you for managing to bring them back to the ship. Sell them at the first next deadline to get a ton of extra spending cash, or save them up for later once the quotas get tough to stay in the game and earn your keep for the Company.

But don't expect the journey to be easy, as the added weight and lightning-prone nature of gold scrap will add an extra layer of challenge...

Creation:

• Since this mod is a little more convoluted than your regular LethalLib scrap mod, it will first have a v0.9.0 Test Release to get some feedback on the balancing of gold scrap, to see how well it holds up when tested on a larger scale, and to find bugs I might have missed. If all goes well, it should hopefully release as a full v1.0.0 Release soon.
  • I also still have some ideas for this mod, so please stay tuned to see what more this mod will have to offer.
  • Something I don't think I'll be able to do though, is animations. Scrap with special animations seem to store them in such a way that it'll be very difficult to use them on the gold version.
• Personally speaking, the creation of this mod was a giant 2-month rollercoaster of a journey with ups and downs and thrills and fears and joys and long evenings, but I'm super happy with the result, and I hope you'll enjoy it too!

Technical talk:

• One massive challenge in making this mod was not being allowed to package the original game's assets in the mod, as that would be redistribution of paid content. But thankfully, thanks to tons of help found across hundreds of web searches, I managed to create a way to read all necessary game assets during runtime, meaning the mod creates itself while you're playing your local version of the game.
• Then, to ensure that you keep seeing the correct models and sounds used for gold scrap, I have opted to save these assets locally in the mod's folder. This way, if you find gold scrap, quit the game, and then boot the game up again, the mod can access these specific assets and load them immediately, to hopefully hinder the play experience as little as possible.
• But, if you are not a fan of reading game assets, having them be saved on your computer, or things just looking and sounding nice, I have added options in the Config file to turn off the loading and saving of assets. Turning this option off will also save a little bit of performance, something I suspect my mod might otherwise demand a bit extra of.
• Additionally, the Save Data can be deleted at any time and the mod will still work as normal, you will not lose your progress. The mod will fall back on placeholder models and not apply sounds until the vanilla items have been found again.

Credits:

• Big props to Zeekerss, seriously. After having to dissect Lethal Company and how it works so much for this mod, I have come to greatly respect what he has delivered with this game, and it's taught me more programming than my college ever has over the past 4 years.
• Massive, massive, MASSIVE thank-you to poprev-3d for answering a question on the Unity Forums, providing a ready-to-go method to copy models during runtime. Without it, this mod would likely never have happened.
  • Link to the thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/reading-meshes-at-runtime-that-are-not-enabled-for-read-write.950170/
• Also a huge thank-you to iwillbenice on the Unity Forums, as they provided a method that made saving and loading audio clips possible.
  • Link to the thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/create-audioclip-from-byte-in-unity.1205572/
• A big thank-you too to all my friends who supported me in the making of this mod, helped test it, and have given feedback about what they liked and hoped for with this mod. A few key features were modeled after things they enjoyed, or things I thought they would enjoy, so I simply wouldn't be as proud to present this mod had it not been for all their support! <3
• And thank you for checking out or even downloading this mod!

v0.9.0

• Test Release