A Beginner's Guide to Making Your First Ravenswatch Mod
The best mods often start as a small itch: I wish this texture were warmer, or this hero should hit a little harder. The good news is that making a mod for Ravenswatch does not require writing a program. RSMM's philosophy is mods ship data, not code — you describe what you want in simple files and the toolkit does the rest.
The shape of a mod
Every mod is a folder with a manifest.toml at its root. That manifest declares what the mod contains:
[[content]]entries — new or replacement assets like textures, models, audio, or text.[[patch]]entries — targeted edits to existing game data, such as a stat value.
That's it. There is no build step you have to babysit and no scripting language to learn for the common cases.
Start by reskinning
The friendliest first project is a texture swap. Pick something small — a UI border, an item glow, a single enemy. Export your new image as a PNG, drop it in your mod folder, point a [[content]] entry at it, and run rsmm apply. The manager cooks your PNG into the format the game reads and installs it. Launch the game and admire your work.
Then try a balance tweak
Once a reskin feels easy, try changing a number. Hero talent magnitudes, enemy aggression, drop rates — many of these are plain values you can override with a [[patch]]. Change one thing at a time and test it. Small, focused mods are easier to debug and more pleasant for other players to use.
Growing from there
When you are comfortable, the SDK opens up: custom magical items, new enemies, model swaps, even Lua-scripted gameplay through an optional loader. Each capability is declarative — you author data and the SDK emits what the game needs.
Publishing
When your mod is ready, share it. Publish it to the registry so other players can install it in one click, and consider writing a short guide here explaining what it does and how to use it. Clear, well-documented mods get downloaded the most.
For the full reference — every content kind, the cipher internals, and the Lua API — see the documentation site. But you do not need any of that to make something fun today. Start small, test often, and have fun.