Been thinking about this for a bit, what do players who hope to mod SC need to have either as solo or collective if they plan to work with org mates on mods. I personally have near zero modding experience (more hacking stuff to get it to work then creating custom mods) and its going to take time to build the skills, which may be a interesting side hobby in its self. So I thought I would ask the question and try and break it down in to sections to act as a suitable resource for other players regardless of their experience. I know CIG had one of the kick start goals as releasing professional level modding tools, but the tools will be of very limited use with out the skills and experience, building these is what this thread is about. I am not thinking of building and adding new vehicles/ships , it's not something I personally plan to do (at least not any time soon) and is well outside the scope of beginner discussion. I more thinking static assets like buildings/ custom cargo/weapon racks or McGuffin's, skins to hard bodied items, customised storage, maybe new machines that convert resource A in to part B, outfits and possibly droids both humanoid (so basically a skin over an NPC frame and custom NPC behaviour to create a HK047 style droid is one of my thoughts) and less humanoid droids. Trying to build new vehicles/ships is going to be a big job for very experienced modders, even just modifing them will take a lot of skill are time, assuming you want to keep the level of detail CIG are aiming for. I think there are the following area's, but feel free to suggest other area's I may have missed due to lack of experience. 1) Creating/modifying asset models I know SC devs have mentioned Blender and other tools, what tools do players with experience with modding recommend and that skill level (beginner/intermediate/advanced) do they recommend them for? 2) Coding, what languages do people recommend in relation to mods for SC. I don't remember CIG ever saying much about the language(s) they program SC in. What are peoples thoughts? 3) suitable (relatively cheap) games that share some tech with SC to break out the crayons to start experimenting with modding, so we can get some experience creating different assets. My first thoughts were games based on the cry engine created around the time it was forked or games running Vulcan. While not ideal given how customised SC is, it the closest I think we would get for know. So that do people suggest? 4) progression, I assume there is logical progression on what players should practice in terms of creating mods. I would have thought it would be stack objects as scenery/skins, then something like storage that is intractable/has simple animations. That do other more experienced moders suggest? 5) Guides, do players have recommendations for free guides for each of the above and at which skill level?