scarlet moss
Hey everyone!
I’m a huge fan of PZ... I’ve got about 1.5k hours in it so far, mostly with mods and playing with friends.
When B42 dropped without multiplayer it felt pretty empty, so we came up with our own workaround: everyone plays on their own singleplayer save with the same world and mods, and we just follow an honor rule of no debug mode (though one of my friends can’t really be trusted with that 😅). The fun for me has always been seeing my friends’ progress, so we were super curious how everyone was doing in their own runs.
That’s when I decided to fix two problems at once. I made a mod that listens to certain in-game events and sends them to a Discord channel so we can all keep up with each other’s progress.
Some examples of what gets posted:
- When someone starts or stops playing
- Level ups in any skill
- Gaining or losing traits (we use dynamic trait mods)
- Taking damage
- And of course… dying 🪦
Since my friends loved the Great Spiffo Rat Race, I also added an optional “Ironman mode”: when you die, your save gets deleted and you have to start fresh. (Yeah, the game isn’t hard enough already — we like to suffer 😅)
I’m mainly sharing this because I thought it turned out pretty cool. Right now it’s very tailored to me and my friends, so I don’t plan on releasing it as-is. But if enough people are interested, I could refactor it into something more polished and release it.
How it works (simple version):
- Lua mods can’t really do background HTTP requests (or at least I couldn’t get it working).
- So for every tracked event, the mod writes a .txt file with JSON info about what happened.
- Then I have a small Java program running alongside the game that watches for those files and posts the updates to Discord.
That’s it! Hope you like the idea. If you’ve got feedback or cool ideas to add, let me know.
Thanks for reading — hopefully this is just the first of many mods I’ll make!
dry quiver