Progress Update: 10/21/26

Hello everyone!

First, I am aware of the issue with coloring placeables. It appears to be linked to the color picker dialog that activates when you use Unlimited Color Configurations. I tested a game with only that one enabled, and I did get an error trying to color vanilla placeables. So, if you guys are having issues with your placeable colors, it is not Design Kit directly. It is that there is a vanilla issue with the extended color picker. Disabling Unlimited Color Configurations is the work around for that for now.

In other news, I am also (still) looking into reports involving the current as well as newer RCS versions. The issue is, and it gets more complex as more implements are able to use the RCS system, that the game itself is really not programmed to work with rows. It is programmed to work with stamped larger areas. The visual rows are handled by the shaders by moving the foliage mesh graphics around to match the spacing settings in the respective foliage xml file(s). In other words, the game itself has no actual rows. It just looks that way.

Anyway, it's not hard to make the visual part of the rows. Painting one pixel stripes across the gdm/grle and making the visual crops appear exactly inside of those stripes is only part of the challenge. Under the hood, there are hundreds of different operations that happen over those areas that have to be adjusted to account for the fact that the whole area is not painted like the game expects. For example, the spray level expects a solid painted area so, when you are only working in strips, it reports just the area under the strips, not the whole area you worked. Same for harvesting, same for cultivating, plowing, etc.

Each of those has to be addressed and each are conditional based on whether a vanilla solid stamped crop is under the work area, a stripe painted RCS crop, or sometimes both. For example, planting RCS beans in vanilla wheat stubble makes the game see striped versions of both wheat and beans in an area where it expects to see just a single crop. No two crops can occupy the same pixel, which is why crops into other crops is not a thing in base game.

In other words, making it look right is the easy part. Making the game understand what is actually happening so all of your field tasks report the right information and update the right areas correctly is the complicated part you can't see. Some things need to continue to work over the whole area, some things need to only happen in the strips, some things need to only happen in between the strips, etc. Takes a bit to figure all that out.

All that being said, the process for me now is just listening to what is being reported and working out a way to keep the RCS crop calculations/operations completely separate from vanilla calculations/operations, as well as a way to set up a system that lets me overlay special RCS versions of functions on top of the originals in a way that still allows the originals (including other mods hooked to those originals) to run as normal at the same time.

It's not hard to just change functions around, but then you break every other mod that adds field functionality to the game. The hard/slow part is finding just the right place to add just the right code at just the right time so you affect everything else running as little as possible.

Short version is, making things function is the easy part. The hard part is making those things function without affecting anything else. That takes time and that's what I'm working on right now.

Good news is, I have things just about ready for the next round of testing. I'm kind of easing off the gas to see what happens when this next expansion drops, but I still plan on having some updates very soon here.