Sample mod - Cores

A rule on the stock pit: your lives are twenty energy cores kept in the cave. An insect that reaches the cave does not cost a life there: it takes a core and walks back through your maze to the nest. Kill it on the way and the core drops where it fell, then drifts home, unless another insect passes close enough to pick it up. Only a core that reaches the nest is lost.

It is a Workshop sample (steam_build/workshop_samples.txt): the game's package leaves it out, and it reaches players once published from Options → Mods. Enable it there and restart. Like any gameplay mod it plays on its own mod profile, so your vanilla save is never touched.

How it works

The gameplay is data only (balance.json), on the game's cores rule (see the modding guide, "Cores"). models.json additionally demonstrates an amber replacement for the stock cyan energy capsule:

• count 20: the run starts with twenty cores, and the top bar calls the lives cores.
• drift_speed 25: board pixels a second a dropped core floats back toward the cave.
• pickup_radius 30: how close an insect must pass to take a dropped core.
• Everything else is vanilla: the maze, the cards, the towers and the factory.

bots.json lets PvP bots play it: their insects steal, carry, drop and recover cores on the bots' own boards with the same rule.

Every insect that reaches the cave has to cross the maze twice, so the same waves are easier than in vanilla. Raise the waves' health in balance.json (difficulty.levels.<n>.health_mult) to make the cores harder to keep.

Replace the core model

{
  "version": 1,
  "models": {
    "Environment/Core": {"file": "models/AmberCore.glb", "material": "imported"}
  }
}

This slot replaces all cores: stored at the cave, carried by insects and dropped on the ground. Removing the entry restores the stock capsule. A model override alone does not enable the cores gameplay rule; keep or compose the cores section of balance.json when using it.

Author one core centred at (0, 0, 0), about 18 units wide and 20 units high, with Godot Y up (Blender Z up with the default glTF export). The game owns its position, slow rotation and scale: 1.0 in storage, 0.85 dropped, 0.6 carried. No pivot names are required. Rigid nested meshes and local transforms are supported; skeletal or baked animations are not. The storage tray is separate from this model. Changing the model does not change pathing or pickup rules.

Embed textures in a self-contained GLB. Imported albedo, normal, roughness, metallic and emission materials are preserved in the shared instanced mesh. The existing 64 MiB model limit and mod loading/prewarm rules apply. Restart after changing enabled mods, as with other model replacements.

The editable stock source is Assets/Models/Source/Core.blend; run tools/art/build_blender_core.py in Blender to rebuild both the stock model and this sample's amber variant.