Personal Tesla Defense Mod

[pluralmonad]

Hello, fellow engineers!

I've been playing Factorio since 2020 and have used mods heavily most of that time. My first Space Age playthrough was vanilla just to experience the game as intended at least once. But everything since then is always full of mods.

I recently created my first official mod and wanted to post it here to see what people think (link at bottom). It is a copy of the personal laser defense equipment that fires the same beam as the tesla turret. I really like the addition of the tesla weapon types and wanted my engineer to have access to this tech for personal defense in late game situations.

I must say that the experience of creating a Factorio mod could not have been smoother. It is clear that a ton of love went into making Factorio very extensible.

Anyone wanting to dip their toe into modding should check out the earlier versions of the mod as it shows essentially a barebones setup to add something to the game.

I expected to have a hard time adding configurability to the mod but adding settings was as straightforward as everything else involved in modding Factorio.

I am a software developer/DevOps engineer by trade and enjoy writing code and automating everything. So I wanted to share the little script I have been using to facilitate faster iterations on my mod the last day or so. It is not super clean, but has really reduced the amount of manual file editing I need to do for each iteration (and forgetting to sync up all the versioning in files). It is a bash script meant to run on a Linux machine. Even if the script as is would not be useful to you, maybe it will give ideas on how to streamline your own mod development lifecycle. Any questions, suggestions, or requests for the script or mod can go here or on the mod discussions.

The factory must grow!

Cheers!


https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PersonalT ... eEquipment

[pluralmonad]

The attached screenshot is the directory/file structure that I use with the above attached script. I run the script like

Code: Select all

bash ./dev.sh test 

or

Code: Select all

bash ./dev.sh pkg

depending on if I am testing or packaging for release.

Screenshot from 2025-02-12 20-07-43.png (24.16 KiB) Viewed 433 times

[eugenekay]

Neat!

This will hopefully simplify my Spidertron Cleanup Squad assigned to Gleba… lasers and rockets don’t always cut it. There are a lot of “kitchen sink” weapons mods that go too hard; this looks to be a nice Vanilla-wishlist style addition.

Can you please upload the mod source to GitHub as well? Thanks for the hard work!


-Eugene

[pluralmonad]

I did not since the mods are not compiled and essentially open source by default (and I have avoided Github since its acquisition). If it would be valuable I will get some code put up there anyway.


Edit: added to Github and link is now on the mod page.

[pluralmonad]

I have added a couple features to this since posting here. The best one is that the personal tesla defense can now fire a fully configurable custom beam (same graphics). All the values that seemed valuable to me now have knobs to turn and adjust the custom beams behavior in startup settings.

Hopefully this makes the mod more accessible to many more play styles.