Creating and Building a Mod

Create your first Geode mod and build it for different platforms

After all that setup, you can now create your first mod!

Creating a New Mod

To do this, open up a terminal where you want to create your project and run:

geode new

Follow the given prompts and afterwards you should have a new folder containing the code for your mod.

Project Files

You may notice the project already comes with a few files. Let’s go over them:

• CMakeLists.txt - This is the main file for your CMake project.
• about.md - Here you can write a very long description page for your mod, in markdown. Think of it as a README for your mod! This file is technically optional, but highly recommended.
• logo.png - This is the icon for your mod, which shows up in-game. This file is technically optional, but highly recommended.
• mod.json - This json file contains all the metadata about your mod, such as name, version, custom resources, settings, etc. See this page for detailed info

If you plan on releasing your mod, remember to edit the about.md and logo.png files!

The source code for your mod can be found inside the src folder.

Additional Files

Geode will also look for these special files within your mod folder:

• changelog.md - Lists all of the changes between versions to the mod; see detailed info
• support.md - Free-form info about how to show support to the developer of the mod; see detailed info

Building Your Mod

Now, to build your mod you have a few options:

If you’re using an IDE such as CLion, VS Code or Visual Studio, head over to the IDE Setup page.

If you’re building for Android, check out the Android section.

Command Line Build

If you want to build your mods manually from the command line you can do that by simply running these commands in your mod’s folder:

# Configures & builds for the current platform
geode build

# If you installed Clang and Ninja earlier, this is required instead
# If this does not work, update your Geode CLI or use CMake directly
geode build --ninja

Check out geode build --help for other options!

Alternative CMake Build

If you have an issue running that command for whatever reason (do let us know!), you can build your mod the same way using these commands:

# Configure CMake
cmake -B build

# Build the project
cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo

If you created a profile in CLI, then the mod should be automatically installed to GD. If not, then the built your.mod.geode package should be in your build folder, from where you can manually install it in-game.

Build for Android

1. Install Android NDK

   Download and install the Android NDK. Extract it somewhere and set the ANDROID_NDK_ROOT environment variable to its path.

   On Windows you must also install Ninja. If you have Scoop, you can do this via scoop install ninja.

2. Get Geode binaries for Android

   You must also get the Geode binaries for Android using the CLI:

   geode sdk install-binaries -p android64
   # Or if you're using a 32 bit phone
   geode sdk install-binaries -p android32
   
3. Build your mod

   Now you can build your mod for Android:

   geode build -p android64
   # Or if you're using a 32 bit phone
   geode build -p android32
   
4. Install to your phone

   You can then copy the built .geode file from the build-android64 folder to your phone at this location:

   /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.geode.launcher/game/geode/mods/
   

Building Windows Mods on Linux

If you have followed the steps earlier and installed all the required tools with geode sdk install-linux, building should be as simple as on Windows:

geode build

If you have installed the Windows SDK and the toolchain in a different way, you will have to provide paths to them manually:

geode build -- -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/clang-msvc-sdk/clang-msvc.cmake -DSPLAT_DIR=/path/to/splat