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- X Rebirth (Workshop)
- X Rebirth VR Edition (Workshop)
- X4: Foundations (Workshop available soon!) (
UI modding currently unstable, see Breaking Changes)
The process of publishing an extension with the X Workshop Tool is almost the same for all listed games.
General publishing rules
General rules and guidelines:
Do not publish extensions that you haven't made yourself, unless you have the author's consent.
Similarly, do not publish modifications of other people's extensions (e.g. fixed versions) without the author's consent.
Do not publish the same extension multiple times. If you are not sure if an upload worked, check your Workshop items online.
If your extension depends on other extensions or if it is potentially incompatible with other extensions, use the description text to warn players.
Extensions support localisation of name and description, but unfortunately the Steam Workshop does not. The title and description texts of Workshop items should be in English, unless you provide content specifically for a non-English audience. But even then, please make sure that English-speaking players can see from the title and description what the item is about.
Preparation
To publish an extension in the Workshop, you will need:
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<content id="" name="Foo" description="Test" version="100">
</content>
Using the Workshop tool
The Workshop tool is contained in the X Tools. It's a command-line based tool, we don't have a GUI for it (yet). You'll need a command console to run it, and the easiest way to do it is to "Play" the X Tools. This will open the Windows command prompt in the X Tools folder, where WorkshopTool.exe is located.
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Type WorkshopTool and press Enter. This will give you an overview of the available commands and switches. Don't be afraid, the tool will ask for confirmation before it uploads anything.
Publishing an extension
Important: You have to agree to the Steam Workshop Legal Agreement to upload any item to the Steam Workshop.
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If your extension has dependencies on other Workshop items, players have to subscribe to all of them manually, otherwise they will get an error message in the game. The dependency extensions will be shown in the in-game extension menu and can also be subscribed there.
Updating an extension
For updating an existing Workshop item, your command line could look like this:
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When the game updates an extension, it checks the the downloaded content.xml for a game version requirement. If the extension requires a higher game version, the game discards the download (with a warning message) and continues to use the existing files on the disk. So if you as a Workshop author change the game version requirement, this will not break anyone's game. However, there are no such checks when you change dependencies on other Workshop extensions and their versions - the update will be applied anyway.
Supporting multiple game versions
In some cases you may want to provide different files for different game versions in the same Workshop extension. This is useful when Egosoft provides a beta of a new game version and you want to adjust your mod for this beta, without affecting all the players who still play the public version with your mod. For example, a new beta version could add new features that you want to include in your mod, or your mod could become incompatible and has to be fixed. You can use the beta phase to make the necessary changes, and support both the released version and the beta version at the same time.
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If you decide to build all your catalogs and the version catalog(s) manually, be aware that you should build them again on each update - the version catalogs must always be a diff to the current version.
Publishing an extension for both X Rebirth and X Rebirth VR Edition
It is possible to publish the same extension for both games, as follows:
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