Add handbook title and text?

[Frepo]

The VS wiki doesn't mention this. Looking at the vanilla language file it looks like I should write something like this

However, this does nothing at all. So I went into primitive survival's (which is a VERY nice mod, except for that fishing totally breaks food balance) lang-file to see how they did it. Discovered that it's written the same way there, and thus not working for PS either.

How does one go about this?

Edited February 2, 2023 by Frepo

[Spear and Fang]

Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me to remove those 1/2 dozen lingering entries I had from days gone by.  AFAIK, the handbooktitle/handbooktext stuff simply wont work for mods right now UNLESS you put your mod's assets directly in the game domain (this can be achieved by putting a game folder inside your assets folder and putting your mod's assets in there).  Which is similar but different to what Tels is doing here (he's patching vanilla files instead).
https://gitlab.com/codesmiths/vs_bricklayers/-/blob/main/assets/bricklayers/lang/en.json
 With his clay assets in the game domain he then prefixes his language entries with game:.  
Another solution would involve a deep dive into the game's c# code, and probably a harmony patch, but I'm not terribly interested in doing that.

"which is a VERY nice mod"
THANKS!

"fishing totally breaks food balance"
On the surface that statement seems about right, but it's a little more complicated than that.  I'm not really seeing any food balance to begin with so it's hard to break it.  Sure, new players struggle to find food until they clue in to the fact that they simply have to make food a priority.  These new players generally don't use mods. 

Seasoned players know that food is extremely easy to get unless they're playing a snowball world or some such.  My dilemma was that fishing should be much easier than hunting, so I made it much easier.  Then I made fishing 100% configurable via the modconfig file so that people could configure it however they like. 

As far as protein goes, you still need to hunt (for fat), and fishing doesn't really detract from that part of gameplay.

Edited February 4, 2023 by Spear and Fang

[Frepo]

Thanks for the info, Fang!

I had a look in the source code for the handbook text stuff. And yeah, it just ain't worth it, there's other stuff I rather spend my time on.

"fishing totally breaks food balance"
After our first in-game year, I now see what you're saying. There really isn't any balance to begin with. Well, I'm hell bent on changing that!

[DavidLokison]

Necroing this here but I actually took a deep dive into the handbook text source code today and opened a PR for fixing the issue for good (hopefully).

In the meantime what actually ended up working for me was instead of using 

{
  "<domain>:<item|block>-handbooktext-<code-with-variants>": "<your awesome handbook text>"
}

to duplicate the domain like so:
 

{
  "<domain>:<item|block>-handbooktext-<domain>:<code-with-variants>": "<your awesome handbook text>"
}

Yes, this inserts another colon into the path.. but that doesn't seem to cause any issues currently, so I will be using this method as a workaround until the issue is fixed.

Hope this helps at least some people out there who want to write handbook content for their mods.

Edited September 12, 2025 by DavidLokison

[xXx_Ape_xXx]

Very useful info @DavidLokison, thank you for figuring this one out.

I've been tearing my hair out (what's left of it) many times, trying to find out why my text isn't showing up in the handbook.

Hope the PR gets accepted and implemented!

[DavidLokison]

You are very welcome! I am glad to have found the underlying issue in the first place.

Also: everything that helps people make more well-documented mods. It's always a pleasure to see someone actually putting in the effort to document their added items and come up with a decent description.

Cheers to more info in the game and less dwelling in unstructured mod info pages.