Compatibility Patches to VT - How to
A simple guide to help you VT lover to add compatibility patches to Vanilla Tweaks!
This article is meant to clarify and help users out there who wants to adress any mismatching visuals they have in their gameplays by using other mods with Vanilla Tweaks and want to share it with other people, mainly for items like seedbags or saplings! (Since we have free permission to add them).
The reason for this is that to keep the mod's consistency, a pattern should be followed, which, shouldn't be too difficult. While this is being written a while after many users already dealt with adding compatibility with a few mods, I should have done it way ago to prevent confusion and avoid any issues. So, my apologies for that.
For starters, how to make seedbags?Seedbags and its variations, including Tree Saplings, are shared in a single file under the main download page. To make them feel more of a part of VT artstyle, a few amount of steps should be followed to give it a full integration feeling. Steps that aren't even that hard, so anyone can do it with a little observation!
Using Seed Bags Outline Color
When adding a crop icon to one of my Seed Bags, I highly recommend paying attention to the colors. One of the things I do to make said icon feel more of a part of the Bag itself is reusing it's colors inside of it. As in the image shown above, (if you zoom them out, I'd say), I reused their outline colors to reinforce the same feature in the icon! Tulips, Melons or a Blue Jazzbeing outlined by the Bag's dark brown, or the Pinkish Wine color from Summer bags getting reutilized as well.
Be cautious that this is not mandatory and should be done only if said changes are harmonical to the sprite. You're not always getting a good result by doing this, so mixing it and leaving a few parts untouched would be the best approach you would find in this situation, or not changing the icon's outline colors at all :)
Remember that they are meant to feel like stickers, holding the bag steady to keep the seeds safe inside. Not too faded, not too highlighted. Try similar color values!
Shading Bag's StickersYou too have to pay attention to what your custom sticker is doing. It's really important to shade it to add depth to the pixelart. By reusing the shades already present in the Seed Bag, it is possible and you don't have to give yourself a headache with new shades!
Start placing darker shades around it - in the corners, at its top, close to the borders. Paying attention and observing the art helps you with the practice.
Great Sticker Placement
Short and simple, it's important to look at where you are placing your sticker. Usually I tend to place iconscloser to the left corner - the direction of where the Seed Bag is facing. This is to help keep the sprite from looking awkward.
It won't always work though, because we're playing with perspective, but I highly advise that. If your icon doesn't look great by doing so,keep it centered! Short answer to that problem.
What are "Special Seed Bag Colors"?Special Bag Colors are another fun topic to talk about, and pretty straightforward too. Basically, to resemble the vanilla or original seed pack colors, I added another option to the mod so users could enable a few selected seeds to keep the colors they originally had
You can use this in your advantage if you like how your modders colored their seed packs and keep both compat and visual variety .
- In the example above, you can see that all of the referenced seeds have their bags with similar or exactly same colors as they have in the vanilla game!
Bag and Seed Variations
Here's each Bag/Seed variation and how they work!
Default Seed Bags
They are your usual and most common designs out there. Meant to have a default disabled color (aka "Vanilla") and each Season tone: green for spring, pink for summer, orange for fall and blue for winter.
Digspot Seed BagsThe new seed bag type added in 1.6. Different from standard seeds, they are not supposed to be colorful based on the season,but rather to be kept that way.
Non-bagged SeedsSeeds with no bags. Simple, yet special and colorful. A fun way to play with seeds designed to be that way. You can have different shapes for each of them, add stacks and have a great time playing with how they look. Definitely one of my favorite vanilla approaches.
Tree Saplings - How do they work?For Tree Saplings, it's as easier as seeds.To maintain differentiation between the different types of saplings, I decided to customize the leaves exposed in their sprites. Using different colors for this is possible.
A mini colored tag placed on the neck of the bag also helps to differentiate who is who and make users less confused.
Remember that if it is not possible to work with the leaves, using the default design is enough. As long as you change their colors and add the already mentioned color tag, great!
And thats it. Thanks for reading my article! ^^
