Fertilizer is a mod loader for Kynseed inspired by IPA. It consists of three parts:

• Fertilizer itself is a game patcher. It will modify the game's executable to call the injector.
• Fertilizer.Injector is the actual mod loader. It will load mods that are inside the mods/ folder.
• Fertilizer.Mod is the interface mods have to provide in order to be loaded.

What Is Fertilizer?

Right now, Fertilizer is just a mod (to be more specific: assembly) loader. Due to this, it's not a complete modding toolkit, nor is it even remotely comparable to those existing for similar games. It has one job, and that is to load assemblies.

That is not to say that it's not possible for it to head down this path - just that it isn't doing it at the moment and there are no real plans to add any of this functionality either right now.

Getting Started

The installation process is kept relatively simple for users:

1. Download the current release (not the source code!) from the releases page.
2. Unzip the contents of the archive into your Kynseed directory. If you're not sure where Kynseed has been installed, on Steam you can open its folder by right-clicking the game in the library, selecting Properties, then Local Files, then clicking on Browse....
3. Double click the Fertilizer.exe that you've just extracted inside the Kynseed-Folder. A command prompt ("black window") will pop up. If everything is going according to plan, it'll tell you that the game has been patched in a green font. If something went wrong, it'll tell you what in a red font.
4. Put any mods you wish to install into the mods/ directory inside your Kynseed folder - this folder is not created by the game itself. Currently, the assembly name of a mod and the folder must match in order for it to be loaded, e.g. mods/Fertilizer.Example/Fertilizer.Example.dll.

Important: Step 3 has to be repeated after every game update and after verifying the game files. Failure to do so will result in no mods being loaded.

Fertilizer creates a fertilizer.log file in the same folder. It is used by the injector to log information about what mods are loaded and what went wrong while loading mods. When having mod trouble, take a look inside and/or send that log file to the mod developer.

For Developers

Developing mods with/for Fertilizer is somewhat straight forward. There's the basic requirements and the slightly more advanced setup:

Basic Setup

This is the more-or-less minimum requirement to get a mod working with Fertilizer. It's not the most comfortable one.

1. Create a new .NET 4.5 or higher library. Fertilizer itself uses .NET 4.6 because 4.6 or higher can be reasonably well be expected to be installed on machines nowadays.
2. Reference Fertilizer.Mod, either as csproj or the compiled assembly in the game directory.
3. Reference whatever else you need - usually this will include Kynseed and perhaps MonoProtoFramework. Note that a lot of Kynseed's logic is internal, so you'll need to work around that by either reflection or something like aelji's IgnoreAccessChecksToGenerator.
4. Create a new class that inherits from Fertilizer.Mod. Implement your mod's logic in OnEnable. While you can also use the constructor, for future-proofness it's recommended to do all game-changing logic in OnEnable.
5. Compile your mod and put it into the mods/ folder inside your Kynseed directory. The folder name and the assembly name must match in order for Fertilizer to load it.
6. Once done, you can zip up the folder of your mod and distribute it.

Advanced Setup

This setup is taking advantage of some options MSBuild offers to simplify the modding process. ExampleMod/AutoPrice is the example, minimal setup for a mod plus one Harmony patch.

1. Create a new solution.
2. Copy the Directory.Build.props, Directory.Build.targets and Paths.user.example from this repository in ExampleMod/ to your mod's solution directory. Re-start Visual Studio once done. This only has to be done once.
3. Rename the Paths.user.example to Paths.user and adjust the settings inside for you.
4. Probably remove or change the <Version>-element in the Directory.Build.props. This file is more or less providing default values for all .csprojs inside the solution.
5. Create a new .NET 4.5 or higher library. Fertilizer itself uses .NET 4.6 because 4.6 or higher can be reasonably well be expected to be installed on machines nowadays.
6. Reference Fertilizer.Mod, either as csproj or the compiled assembly in the game directory. When you want to reference the compiled assembly, you can use <GameAssembly Include="Fertilizer.Mod" /> to do so.
7. In order for the internal-bypass to work, you'll also need to reference the IgnoresAccessChecksToGenerator NuGet.
8. Reference whatever other game assembly you require to reference using <GameAssembly Include="..." />.
9. Set the project's OutDir to $(GameDir)/mods/$(AssemblyName) to put your mod's files in the right directory straight away. Unless you have a non-mod project in your solution, you can move this instruction to the Directory.Build.props.
10. Create a new class that inherits from Fertilizer.Mod. Implement your mod's logic in OnEnable. While you can also use the constructor, for future-proofness it's recommended to do all game-changing logic in OnEnable.

<GameAssembly> is a way of referencing game assemblies which is both independent of the installation folder (thanks to the Paths.user), and has the additional benefit of automatically registering the assembly as a target for IgnoreAccessChecksTo if the generator has been installed. In order for this setup to work, at least the Directory.Build.targets and Paths.user has to exist at a solution level.