This page will go over what you can expect in the toolkit, and get you used to some of the styles I use when writing and designing tutorial pages - as I try and use visual indicators throughout to separate information depending on who it's targeted at. There are layers for beginners, modding vets, and Sim Settlements 1 alumni, and depending on your background, some of the information is skippable for you.
If you’re a Sim Settlements 1 addon vet, many of the things I’m going to show you will look familiar and most of your knowledge working on the original will still be valuable. Virtually every system has been re-designed from scratch and so will work a little differently from an implementation perspective, so it’s definitely worth reading!
We also have a chapter dedicated to converting your addon over with our simple conversion process which can save you a ton of effort if you just want to migrate your SS1 addon pack over.
Sim Settlements 2 is extremely moddable. Almost every aspect of the mod can be injected into easily by other mod authors (that means you! Maybe you haven't made a mod yet - but you are about to!). While there is a lot of overlap between systems, you can often learn how to add content to a particular aspect in a quick tutorial and then build on that knowledge and do more complicated things later on after you've gone through more.
Many of these tutorials have been written sequentially in a section titled Guided Series. Each of these is prefixed with a number so you can see where you are in this series. This allows me to avoid having to repeat a lot of the same information from topic-to-topic.
If you want to jump ahead to specific topics you're after, that will frequently be possible - especially for things that are not related to new Buildings. Some of the tutorials will definitely have pre-requisites in the list, such as the more advanced building plan tutorials will actually require you have gone through the previous ones regarding building plans.
So you can always try skipping to what you're after, if you get lost, double-back to the beginning and try reading a few more.
If you find yourself struggling, or just want some company to learn besides, we have a Discord server set up to help people who are learning to make content for Sim Settlements, head to our forums to request an invite!
All that said, I prefer to be excessively wordy with my tutorials, and assume you know nothing. While some folks who are more experienced might find this irritating, I would personally always prefer explicit steps so I'm not left wondering if I did a particular step correctly. For those of you who can't handle all this reading, there will companion videos for many of the tutorials walking you through a video version of the guide where you can just watch someone do it. (If a video tutorial doesn't yet exist for a guide - poke us on the forums and request we prioritize whatever one you're interested in!)
Throughout my tutorials, you will occasionally stumble upon different colored text, or block quotes like this. These are done to highlight things that are useful to know, but can be skipped if you are just trying to power through and do the steps required to add something.
Green text indicates something important to newbies, that experienced mod authors probably already know.While red text indicates something that is a little more advanced for experienced authors, and if you find reading it confusing - don't worry, you'll learn it again along the way and it will make way more sense to you the next time you read it.
You'll also see that I like to make use of bold, italics, and underlines throughout the text - these I use just to make something stand out and break up walls of text. I don't have a particular pattern for these - it likely just means I thought that bit should catch your eye and I liked the way that particular font style looked for it.
Finally, this toolkit, and the mod itself are going to be constantly evolving. So check back periodically for new guides, or for edits to existing guides (I'll be sure to display important changes to guides in a way that people who had previously gone through the guide can find those changes quickly)!