TUTORIAL - Mod Constructor 1 (Patreon)

INTRODUCTION

What is the Mod Constructor?

The Mod Constructor is a modding tool made and maintained by Zerbu, specifically studied to be user friendly and allow anyone to create... actually a lot of important things like traits, aspirations, interactions, social events, buffs, etc... when you can create buffs and traits in the Sims 4, you can already do a lot of things.

You can get the Constructor for free HERE 

The tool is not only Free, it's also open source:

We don't much care about it, though... we only need to get the tool, so we'll click the DOWNLOAD button:

Once we're done downloading the .zip file, we can go ahead and extract it into it's own folder:

Beware that it's not an installer, the software is unzipped inside the folder, so you really want to extract it into its own folder.

You'll have a number of files and folders, we need to run the .exe file:

It will open the first interface, which is this one:

Before letting us create a Mod, it wants us to choose a Creator Name and the name of the mod, do it:

And click "Create Mod" to go to the next interface:

Quick note: some features need Python to work, if asked, a download and install Python from the download page the Constructor will conveniently open for you:

We'll be looking at this first interface very fast, there is not much to say here:

The two most important things are the ADD ELEMENT button and the EXPORT PACKAGE.

If you need help, there is also the HELP function with a lot of information:

Now, I find these not so easy to follow for a complete beginner, but they're not impossible either. 

The ADD ELEMENT button allows us to actually start working on our mod:

There are a bunch of things we can start adding to our mod, and they're also categorized by how difficult they are. So, let's look at it:

As beginners, we can add a trait, a lot trait or a club rule to our mod, we can also click more info if we need help.

As intermediate, we can add aspiration tracks, careers, holiday traditions, objective sets, odd jobs, situations/events and social interactions.

As advanced, we can go so far as adding super interactions and immediate interactions, trait pickers and global modifiers. Now, lot of this needs a basic understanding of how the game works on a deeper level, and we'll not be getting into it in detail in this introductive tutorial. This is just to show you that you can actually make a full working and rather complex mod by using only the Constructor without opening the game files AT ALL, just by using the user friendly interface.

The last two categories allow us to add even more functions to our mods. Again, we're not going into that, now... to work on this level is actually easier to mess around in the game files, look at how Maxis did things, to understand what does what, and how things work.

We'll go back to our BEGINNER and start adding elements:

You want to give your element a name... don't call it just trait or it's going to get messy pretty fast, give it a name that is recognizable and click "create element":

At this point, we already have a trait... we'll get into the trait in the next tutorial. Right now, I only want you to see the structure of the Constructor interface. We can add other elements to our mod, like another trait:

We now have a mod with two traits. We can go on adding elements, but a this point we're just going to EXPORT the package and look what we did so far in Sims 4 Studio:

Click EXPORT PACKAGE, give it a name and SAVE

As you see the Constructor gave me a package, without me going into S4S, create a new package and start importing XMLs from the game (if you followed my other tutorials you know what I'm talking about, if you didn't I'm going to give a quick tour on how we do the same thing without using the Constructor).

Let's open the Package in Sims 4 Studio and see all the stuff the tool did for us without us having to work for it:

So, the Constructor gave us: the STBL for the text to appear in game automatically, two XMLs for the Traits, two Buffs (those are associated with the traits as core buffs, we'll see what they are in another tutorial), and the SimData files to go with them. It also did for us all the Instance IDs part.

If I was to do this manually, I would need to:

Import a trait into an empty package from the game files:

Also import the CORE Buff, which is this one:

Manually change the names and instance IDs:

Manually associate the Buff to the trait:

Manually create the STBL for the text (and manually add the text into it):

Do all of it again for a second trait. 

Apart for the file names and the actual tuning of the traits (and the fact that my manual package only has one trait and one buff) my manual mod and constructor mod are exactly the same thing:

How can you tell if a mod is made with the Constructor?

First thig: the SimData files are all named Constructor:

The file naming also follows some specific Costructor naming system my manual package doesn't follow:

Second thing: the Constructor outputs xmls that are optimized for the game, so they are all uncommented

Here you can see some differences between the Constructor XMLs:

A XMLs directly imported from the game:

The Constructor is a great tool that allows you to make a lot of stuff rather easily. Now, I ditched it because I find easier to manage, update, and create mods manually. When you need to update something made with the Constructor you need to export the mod again, and if you manually fixed something you also need to do it again to the newly exported file. Also, to fully understand the potential of the Constructor you actually need to know how the game works, and to understand it, nothing is better than making a huge mess with the files manually and break the game in the worst way... apart from this, the Constructor does for you a lot of work. 

Next time we'll get into the various options in the traits.

You can find the folder with the screenshots from this tutorial as an attachment to this post if you want to see them in a better resolution.