Mod:Modding/Blueprint

Blueprint

Blueprints are files that contain data about your mod. They can range from actors, and character BPs to an item, or a damage type.

Blueprints have a "parent" that they inherit data from. Children of a parent can be used in place of them in some instances. For example, fungal wood is a child of regular wood, therefore, fungal wood can be used to craft engrams that require wood, or a creature that does extra damage against a raptor, will also deal extra damage against variants of raptors, such as aberrant raptors, which are children from the base raptor.

Blueprints have three tabs, Defaults, Components, and Graphing.

Defaults are variables you can modify to change aspects of the blueprint. For example, the boolean(a true false checkbox) "prevents character basing' which is in DinoCharacter_BPs will, when checked, stop the player from walking on top of a dinos collision, While the integer(a whole number) "Required Engram Points" in EngramEntries can be changed to modify how many engram points you need to spend to unlock the crafting recipe of an item. Variables that have been modified from their parent's values will have a yellow arrow to the right of them, which both tells you the variable is modified and when clicked, resets the variable to its parent's value. Variables that you create while graphing will also show up here.

The components tab, which is only used for actors(structures, weapons, dinos, stuff that exists in the world) are where you add components. These can do several things. Some components, like meshes and particles are visual, or add collision. Some are data sets, like your character status component, which determines things like character health.

Graphing is where you create custom logic to do whatever you want. You can modify variables when certain events happen using nodes, or cause other events to happen, like spawning a creature, destroying self, or giving something a buff. Some key events(Things that trigger logic to run) are Event Begin Play, which runs your logic whenever the blueprint begins existing (Server (re)start, spawned, etc.) and Event Tick, which runs every tick(basically constantly).

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This is an example of graphing. You could then use this to scan for a certain player, then if that player is found, spawn a dino near them. This could be used to great effect in confusing or trolling a friend.