Subset Games Forum

First time ive ever been on a forum so sorry if I mess something up here.

So I have an idea for a race that I have done some art for. It cannot heal in any way or be cloned. When it kills an enemy crewmember, it will become fallen and join your crew. If an enemy is in melee combat, it will take 2 damage every time it hits this race (I have not not been in modding long at all, so I dont think this game actually counts when your crew is 'punched', so it may just have to have a bit of increased damage). It also has an ability that is much like the crystal crew, but it covers each tile in the room its in with spikes (if you could see the art for it you would understand why its spikes. It is much like rainbow six siege's zombies in terms of looks) that when any enemy steps on it, they take 20 or so damage. It does, however, cost this race 10 hp to actually deploy the spikes.

This race is kind of like an infected race and would have a neat play style, as you would have to constantly be killing enemy crew while losing your own. (If anyone could actually make this or make any kind of race as I am again very new to modding, I would appreciate if you could like video it or something as I would love to learn how). Now my question is, could I theoretically do this with Operation: Clonebay?

I'm gonna cut it dry for you, no. Changing/making abilities for races is impossible, so is making a new race. The only thing really editable with crew is changing their looks, costs, rarity, name and description, and you can't add more races then there are now, which is 7.

Small correction, there are 9 races. Human, slug, engi, zoltan, rock, mantis, lanius, crystal, ghost. The last one isn't used in vanilla data but the game accepts it. But the thing to note about FTL modding is that what everyone on this forum is doing is not modding in the traditional sense since we're only editing data files, not core game files/code. Which means the game is our engine and we're limited by the strict requirements it sets. Technically it is possible to mod the core game files as well (despite the game being closed source and written in a compiled language), and some people have indeed done this but it's very much a burden, especially so with the recent updates (FTL 1.6.x) having spoiled all previous progress. But if you share your custom assets (on some public host that doesn't expire) I'm sure someone some day will make a core mod to add it, even if it takes ten years (by which point the game might be open source anyway. Not guaranteed but zasdarq said there's a chance).