Hello everyone! I’m Alice the intern – I’ve been working at Failbetter this week. I’ve been lucky enough to get to play around with the latest Sunless Sea update, which gives players the ability to add mods!

As an example of the sort of changes you can now make to the game, I’ve transformed the Sisters of Hunter’s Keep into the Brothers of Hunter’s Keep.

Because the sisters are mentioned so often this involved altering lots of chunks of story, renaming some qualities, replacing the images used for their qualities and storylets, and changing descriptions of items and places related to the sisters.

Step 1: All of the files I needed to change can be accessed by going to: C:\Users\Your PC Name\AppData\LocalLow\Failbetter Games\Sunless Sea or for Mac users: Users/Your User name/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Sunless Sea

Step 2: In order to start working on the mod I created a new folder called addon – this is where all of the modified files go. Once you update Sunless Sea the addon folder should appear here, and that’s where you should put any mods you want to add.

Step 3: When you’re changing a file you should create a duplicate of it in addons then create and place it in a new sub-folder with the same name of whichever folder in was in within the Sunless Sea directory. The events file in the entities folder contains the information for all of the storylets in Sunless Sea so it was the file I needed to edit the most.

Step 4: All of the files I needed to edit for this mod were .JSON files, so I used JSON Editor Online to work on my mod, copying and pasting the contents of the files into the JSON editor.

Step 5: After I finished editing all the files that needed changing and made sure they were saved in addons in the right sub-folders, the game merged the new information from the addons folder with the original files and the mod was ready to play!

Tips

Start by making small changes. Big story-related changes will require altering multiple files and it can be difficult to find every instance of what you are trying to change.

If you are working in the online JSON editor like I did, paste your work into notepad and save regularly – otherwise all is lost if your browser crashes!

If you make multiple mods that change the same event, one change will overwrite the other. Multiple mods should work as long as there are no conflicting changes.

If you want to stop using a mod remove it from your addon folder.

Happy modding delicious friends!