Modding Guide

For content authors: aircraft, missions, terrain, art, audio and AI behaviour.

A mod is a directory with a manifest.toml in it. Everything else is optional, and the engine ships builtin fallbacks for every asset class, so a pack that provides one aircraft and nothing else is valid and loads cleanly.

Start here

Page	What it covers
Pack manifest	manifest.toml: id, namespace, version, priority, dependencies
Asset formats	The canonical reference for every asset format a pack can contain

Authoring

Page	What it covers
3D models	glTF conventions, coordinate system, LODs, damage meshes, animation channels
Textures	Source vs artifact, channel layout, Basis Universal compression
Liveries	Livery TOML and the two-vocabulary rule
Flight models	Every field of the aircraft aerodynamics TOML
Weapons & sensors	Radar modes, IR, RWR, IFF, datalink, seekers, countermeasures
Missions	Mission YAML: coalitions, objects, triggers, objectives, airspace zones
Game modes	Teams, scoring, respawn rules, match lifecycle
AI scripting	The Lua API: controllers, the world module, and the sandbox rules
Satellite terrain	Generating imagery tiles from open satellite data
Localization	Translating the game and pack strings

Rules that bind

• Aircraft likeness policy — real types may be modelled, but sources must be public-domain and every aircraft needs a SOURCES.md. Read this before starting an aircraft, not after.
• Validate before you publish. Every asset class has a validate-* tool (tools), and the pack CI gates run them. A file that fails its validator will not load.