Frameworks

Reusable systems built to be built on — each one abstracts a hard, general problem once so a modder using it never has to solve that problem themselves. Distinct from Deep Dives, which document a single investigation end to end; a framework here is an ongoing library with its own API surface, likely to keep growing.

Looking for Essentials (Ess)? It now has its own top-level section — see Essentials (Ess). It outgrew this category: it’s no longer one framework among several, it’s the recommended starting point for any new mod, and it absorbed three of the standalone libraries this page used to list. Everything below is what remains here — an example gamemode, and a guide to writing your own library.

• WaveDefense — not a library but the worked example of gluing three of those predecessors together: a wave-survival gamemode where a Contract Framework contract is only the launcher, ModNet’s authority model decides which machine runs the simulation, and UI Kit draws the entire HUD and setup menu itself.
• Building Your Own Framework — not a library either, but the tutorial for writing one: OnLoad load order, registering a global safely, and the safe/unsafe patterns Ess itself follows, ending in a basic skeleton to build from.

Looking for Ess’s now-superseded predecessors? See Deprecated Frameworks — Contract Framework, UI Kit, and ModNet are still documented in full, just no longer where new mods should start.