I grew up making mods for my favorite video games. The Zone itself wouldn’t exist without its influences, most of all Archipelago and Love In The Time of Seið—everything is a remix! 💿) So I would dig it if you had a chance to do the same. That’s what these tools are all about!” — Raph

What is this?

You can now make your own Mods for The Zone just by editing a spreadsheet, from small tweaks to changing pretty much every piece of content in the game.

To make a Mod, you’ll need:

• To be familiar with The Zone. It’s helpful to have played at least once.
• The Zone Base Content Spreadsheet (Base Content). This includes (almost) all the content in the game, and is where the Modding actually happens

Here’s what it looks like:

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This way of making an online RPG moddable (and even some of the code at the heart of The Zone!) is inspired by Randy Lubin’s Story Synth, a delicious way to build an entire storytelling game using just a spreadsheet.

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This is a work-in-progress I’ll keep adding new ways to customize The Zone as y’all ask for them! Please report bugs and feature requests in the Discord or contact me directly [email protected]

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What can I modify?

The Zone is a very opinionated set of rules and content designed to create a Play To Lose experience with certain principles. However, there’s a lot of room within that to experiment.

Control your game experience

• Want to have a game that’s just Character scenes? Just remove the Scene cards you don’t to have show up.
• Want a game with a particular set of locations? You can do that too! (You can change whethere they are random or ordered in a particular way by changing the value of locationOrder)

Make “house” tweaks

• Minor content tweaks: what if the village was actually your hometown? What if the apartments were in your neighborhood? Or perhaps you just want to make slight changes to one of the character’s backstories

Theme the game