Dupery – Create or Customise Duplicant Personalities

UPDATE 2023/01/23: Fixed a potential crash on startup.

UPDATE 2023/01/14: Fixed the crash on startup with the Hot Shots update. Unfortunately, saves from before the update with custom dupes may not load.

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BETA VERSION (use with care and please give feedback, danke schön)

WARNING: Some game updates have broken old saved games using this mod. This is likely only a concern if you’re using custom hairstyle mods, e.g. Print Cassidy / So Many Dupes. Please treat saves using custom hairstyles as unstable until a permanent solution can be found. Thank you.

Welcome to Dupery!

This mod is designed to address the limited options in the game for customising the pool of printable duplicants, and what they look like. You will be able to add brand new duplicants to the game, as well edit or remove the existing ones.

Did you know there are exactly 35 duplicant personalities in the game, and their appearance and basic traits (stress/joy) will never change? Well, it’s true. But no longer! Ever wanted to give Otto a haircut? Make Nails a Sparkle Streaker? Give every dupe a red shirt? Create a duplicant named "Leeroy Jenkins" that will randomly show up in your games forever? Randomise every printable duplicant’s appearance because you want more chaos in your life? With Dupery, you can do all that and more.

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– Disables the limit on which duplicants are available when starting a new colony; Ari, Mae, Ada, Meep, Liam and Banhi will be available right from the start. Why was that even a thing? It’s gone now!

By default, that’s the only thing the mod will do. But, when fed information from the necessary files, the following features will be available:

– Modify any of the 35 default personalities from the vanilla pool of duplicants. Change their names, descriptions, stress/joy traits, and each bit of their appearance (hairstyle, shirt, etc). You can also toggle randomization of their properties, or remove them from your game entirely so that they will never show up again (they can be un-removed, of course). See the instructions below for how to do this.

– Grants you the ability to add new duplicant personalities that will be available to be printed, just like the original 35. These can have custom names, descriptions and are able to use any of the traits, hairstyles, etc of normal duplicants. Instructions below.

– Dupery will attempt to import personalities from other compatible mods it finds in your subscriptions, making it possible to create custom duplicant personality mods and share them on the Workshop. Custom hairstyles from compatible mods will also be imported, allowing brand new hairstyles to be applied to your creations. See the Custom Personality Mods section for more information, including a cautionary message about disabling mods that you’ve previously printed duplicants from.

NOTE: Any changes to duplicants will NOT affect existing duplicants in saves. Only the pool of duplicants that are available via the Printing Pod, or to new Colonies, will be changed. This means that the mod is compatible with any saved game, and shouldn’t interfere with other mods that alter duplicants. Custom duplicants, once printed, behave as traditional duplicants and their characteristics wont change even if you uninstall this mod.

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Instructions for how to use the mod are on the mod’s wiki, here[github.com].

In short, Dupery works by creating JSON files inside the mod folder which can be used to customise or add duplicant personalities. Some amount of JSON knowledge is needed, but not much. The examples in the instructions should give you a basic idea of what to do.

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This is one of the main purposes of the Dupery mod. With Dupery, you can install other people’s custom personalities via the Workshop. The Print Cassidy mod was created to show this feature off. With that, you can add a duplicant named Cassidy to your game (though, you should first read the warning below).

WARNING: While it’s usually fine to print custom duplicants and then uninstall the Dupery mod, if a character is using a non-vanilla accessory (such as Cassidy’s luscious pink hair) then any save that they are in will be unusable until the mod is re-enabled. To solve this you must re-enable the mod or, if you wish to keep playing the save un-modded, you can use a save file editor to remove them from the game (or just change their body parts to be compatible with the vanilla game).

If you’re a mod maker, you can use Dupery to simplify the process of creating and sharing custom duplicants. The example mod mentioned above, Print Cassidy, uses Dupery to add a custom personality and hairstyle into the game. You can use that as a template for creating your own characters and uploading them to the Workshop.

More information about how to do that is available on the Print Cassidy mod page, or at this link[github.com]. For convenience, I’ve uploaded the the source files for the mod and custom pink hair anim here[github.com]. Please use those as a reference.

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– An in-game personality pool editor, so that people don’t have to mess around with JSON files to do stuff. I need to figure out how to make a menu first.

– Example mod showing off how to create a shareable custom duplicant with a custom hairstyle and localisation. Done, see Creating your own personality mod.

– Support for custom anims to be imported for HeadShape, Mouth, Eyes, Body and Arm parts. Currently, every part except Hair will have animation glitches and I don’t know why.

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Are welcome. Please suggest how the mod can be improved and made more useful for people. Or, if you’re an absolute wizard and want to tinker with the code and submit changes, here’s the GitHub link[github.com].

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I would suggest reading the information above (especially the aforementioned instruction manual[github.com]) to make sure your problem isn’t already covered there. Otherwise, feel free to comment and I will try to help.

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I have to thank the Oxygen Not Included modding community for providing all the clever guides and tools and stuff that let me make this mod. And, obviously, the team at Klei for making a game at all.

Thanks also to the voiceroid hairstyle mod, for giving me the idea to make customising duplicant appearance more of a thing. Really, I just released this in the hope that people would come along and make more character mods. Don’t Starve can’t have all the fun.