Snippets
Small, copy-pasteable one- or few-liners for common tasks. Run any of these from lua_console.py first to see them work, then move them into an OnLoad/OnKey script once you know what you want. If you haven’t read Your First Mod yet, that’s where OnLoad/OnKey/KEYVAL are explained — this page assumes you already know where a snippet like this would go.
Looking for a complete, ready-to-drop-in script instead of a building block? See Sample Scripts.
Every snippet below is a real call pattern pulled from the game’s own scripts, not guessed — but “real call pattern” isn’t the same as “tested by a human in-game.” Check the banner at the top of this page.
Print debug info
The simplest possible thing — confirms your script is running and lets you inspect a value:
Loader.Printf("[mymod] cash = " .. Player.GetCash())
Read / give cash
MrxPmc is a resident/ module, not an engine namespace, so it isn’t automatically visible from a console chunk or OnLoad/OnKey script — import() it yourself first (confirmed by live testing: skip this and you get attempt to index global 'MrxPmc' (a nil value)). See the Glossary if that’s surprising.
import("MrxPmc")
local nCurrent = MrxPmc.GetCashQty()
MrxPmc.AddCashQty(10000) -- relative: add 10,000
-- MrxPmc.AddCashQty(nCurrent * -1) -- zero it out, if you ever need to
Confirmed by live testing: the lower-level Player.SetCash(...)/Player.AddCash(...) also genuinely change the balance, but skip the HUD refresh MrxPmc.AddCashQty triggers — the on-screen number won’t visibly update even though the value changed. Use MrxPmc.AddCashQty/AddFuelQty, not the raw Player.* setters, if you want what’s displayed to actually update.
Read / give fuel
Fuel has both a current quantity and a capacity — raising the quantity past the capacity does nothing until you raise the capacity too. Same import() requirement as cash above:
import("MrxPmc")
local nFuel = MrxPmc.GetFuelQty()
local nCap = MrxPmc.GetFuelCapacity()
MrxPmc.SetFuelCapacity(9999, true) -- raise the cap first
MrxPmc.AddFuelQty(5000) -- then add fuel
Toggle infinite ammo
Object.SetInfiniteAmmo(Player.GetPrimaryCharacter(), true) -- on
-- Object.SetInfiniteAmmo(Player.GetPrimaryCharacter(), false) -- off
Confirmed working by live testing — with one nuance: this doesn’t mean “never reload.” The magazine you’re currently firing still empties normally and still needs a reload; what’s infinite is your reserve ammo count, which stays maxed instead of depleting. Grenades behave the same way (infinite reserve, but you still throw them one at a time). If you want the mag itself to never empty, this call alone isn’t enough — that’d need a different/additional call, not yet identified.
If you’re in co-op and want to affect the second player too, there’s a matching Player.GetSecondaryCharacter().
Get your current position
Useful for debugging, or as a building block for anything that needs to know where the player is:
local x, y, z = Object.GetPosition(Player.GetLocalCharacter())
Loader.Printf(string.format("[mymod] pos = %.1f, %.1f, %.1f", x, y, z))
Confirmed working by live testing — returns real, sane coordinates matching the player’s actual in-world position.
Put a marker/blip on an object
This is the same pattern the game’s own radar-objective modules (crate, blippable) use to put a minimap/off-screen blip on a world object:
Marker.AddBlip(uGuid, "temp_radar_icon_airplane", 48, 255, 255, 255, 255, 0.5, 16, 20)
uGuid is the target object’s handle and "temp_radar_icon_airplane" is a texture name (swap for whatever icon you want, assuming it exists as a loaded asset). The trailing numeric arguments are copied verbatim from working game code (size/color/alpha/scale-ish values) — their exact individual meaning hasn’t been independently confirmed argument-by-argument, so treat this as “known to work with these values” rather than a fully documented signature. If you need a different visual result, adjust one argument at a time and observe.
Confirmed working by live testing — tested with uGuid = Player.GetLocalCharacter() (blip on your own character). The blip does render, but at ground level under the object — on a character, it can be visually obscured by nearby geometry unless you jump or look from above. Don’t assume “no icon visible” means it failed; check the minimap itself (blips render there even when the in-world icon is hidden by geometry) before concluding the call didn’t work.
React to an event instead of polling
The engine event pattern used throughout resident/ — fire a callback once, later, instead of checking a condition every frame:
Event.Create(Event.TimerRelative, {2}, function()
Loader.Printf("[mymod] two seconds later")
end, {})
Confirmed working by live testing — fires exactly once, at the correct delay. Tested at 2s, 5s, and 20s, all reliable.
New to Lua? Click to expand
That function() ... end sitting inside the Event.Create(...) call, with no name of its own, is called an anonymous function — a function defined right where it’s used instead of with function Foo() ... end somewhere else. Event.Create takes it as an argument and calls it later, once the timer fires, exactly like MrxMultiPageMenu.AddOption("Add cash", function(nCash) ... end, ...) does elsewhere in this wiki. This is an extremely common pattern in this codebase: “here’s some code to run later, when X happens” — the callback function is the “later.”
You’ll also see local KEYVAL = "insert" and local nCurrent = ... elsewhere on this page. local limits where a name is visible — leave it off and the name becomes global (visible from anywhere), which is almost never what you want for a throwaway variable inside one script. See Your First Mod and the Resident Modules landing page for more on this.
For a real per-object hook (the pattern every world-object script uses to defer setup until the object is actually live), see the OnActivate / Awake explanation on the Resident Modules landing page.
Dump any table’s contents to the log
Useful any time you want to know what’s actually inside a data table (tSupportData, _tFactions, whatever) instead of guessing from source — some tables (like MrxSupportData.tSupportData) start empty in source and only get populated at runtime, so reading the file doesn’t tell you the final shape.
Drop this as scripts/OnBoot/dump_helper.lua so DumpTable stays callable for the rest of the session:
function DumpTable(t, sName, nMaxDepth, nDepth, tSeen)
nDepth = nDepth or 0
nMaxDepth = nMaxDepth or 3
tSeen = tSeen or {}
local sIndent = string.rep(" ", nDepth)
if type(t) ~= "table" then
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. tostring(sName) .. " = " .. tostring(t) .. " (" .. type(t) .. ")")
return
end
if tSeen[t] then
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. tostring(sName) .. " = <already dumped, cyclic/shared reference>")
return
end
tSeen[t] = true
if nDepth > nMaxDepth then
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. tostring(sName) .. " = <table, max depth reached>")
return
end
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. tostring(sName) .. " = {")
local tKeys = {}
for k in pairs(t) do table.insert(tKeys, k) end
table.sort(tKeys, function(a, b) return tostring(a) < tostring(b) end)
for _, k in ipairs(tKeys) do
local v = t[k]
if type(v) == "table" then
DumpTable(v, tostring(k), nMaxDepth, nDepth + 1, tSeen)
elseif type(v) == "function" then
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. " " .. tostring(k) .. " = <function>")
else
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. " " .. tostring(k) .. " = " .. tostring(v) .. " (" .. type(v) .. ")")
end
end
Loader.Printf(sIndent .. "}")
end
Then, from the console:
import("MrxSupportData")
DumpTable(MrxSupportData.tSupportData, "MrxSupportData.tSupportData", 2)
Confirmed working by live testing — an early version of this is exactly how the support item catalog was first explored. Fully recursive dumps get verbose fast (one real table produced ~3000 log lines) — for building a clean reference table, skip DumpTable and write a narrower one-line-per-entry loop instead, printing only the specific fields you care about:
local tKeys = {}
for k in pairs(MrxSupportData.tSupportData) do table.insert(tKeys, k) end
table.sort(tKeys)
for _, k in ipairs(tKeys) do
local d = MrxSupportData.tSupportData[k]
Loader.Printf(string.format("%s | %s | cash=%s | fuel=%s | max=%s | type=%s",
k, tostring(d.sName), tostring(d.nCashCost), tostring(d.nFuelCost), tostring(d.nMaxStock), tostring(d.sType)))
end
That’s the actual script the support catalog was built from — one line per item instead of ~20.
Ready for something more involved?
Everything above reads or writes a value. Case Study: Overriding a Function walks through the next step up — replacing a piece of the game’s own logic — end to end, including the wrong turns along the way. The result of that case study is also available as a ready-to-use script under OnLoad Scripts.
Something not here?
If you worked out a useful snippet that isn’t listed, it’s worth adding — this page is meant to grow.