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Editor Mods and Pagonia Land

The Pagonia Editor that ships with the game (since the 1.4.0 "Quality of Life & Pagonia Editor Update") is now the primary, EE-supported way to author GameDatabase mods. This page explains how editor-authored mods relate to Pagonia Land's tools — where the two meet, where they don't, and which to reach for.

The short version: the editor owns authoring; Pagonia Land owns understanding, managing, and reproducing. They are complementary. Most modders will author in the editor and still use this project's reference catalog and mod manager beside it.

What the editor authors

As of the 1.4.0 official release the Pagonia Editor authors, through a UI:

  • Map-scoped GameDatabase changes — entity changes active only while playing a specific editor map (scenarios, custom objectives, story telling).
  • Globally-active GameDatabase changes — entity changes that apply across every map and game mode while the mod is enabled, including balancing (population growth, production ratios, combat units, raids, plant growth, recruitment/production/building costs, worker counts).
  • Single-language localization — e.g. a custom name for a new building.
  • New objectives, dialogues, characters, triggers; new buildings/recipes consuming existing or new commodities.

It does this with "create, replace, unload or enhance … by using proxies". A "proxy" is the user-facing name for the engine's InheritanceMode inheritance model that this repo documents under Confirmed primitives (Template / Replace / Incremental / Unload) — it is not a new primitive. Custom 3D-mesh import is still not supported; new entities reuse shipped meshes/textures/audio.

For using the editor itself, see EE's Map database modding wiki. This project deliberately does not document the editor's UI or its internal project format — that is EE's, and it changes fast.

The integration point: a published .pak

When you publish an editor mod, the editor compiles its project into an ordinary .pak in the same module layout the shipped game paks use (GameDatabase + compiled localization + any map). That published pak — not the editor's internal project — is the only thing Pagonia Land's tools interact with.

So a published editor mod is, to this project's tools, just another pak:

Common questions

Can I open or convert an editor mod into the patcher's mod.yaml format? No. The editor's editable project format is EE's and is not something this project reads or converts. You can inspect a published editor mod's pak with pagonia-paker (above), but there is no editor-project → mod.yaml importer, by design — it would chase a moving, EE-owned format. The two authoring formats are independent.

Can the manager install and deploy an editor-published mod? If you have the published .pak as a file (or in a folder/zip/git repo), the manager handles it like any pak-carrying mod. The caveat is distribution: for Pioneers of Pagonia, mod.io currently only exposes the Map mod type, which the in-game subscription/UGC flow owns — so editor mods distributed through the in-game browser live in that flow, not in pagonia-manager. The manager's reach is paks/mods you point it at from a folder, zip, direct URL, GitHub repo, or a subscribed catalog. See Mod Distribution Patterns → Distribution Channels.

How do an editor mod and a hand-authored (patcher) mod behave together on one install? Both end up as paks the engine merges at load time, resolved by load order — last-loaded Replace/Unload wins, Incremental stacks (see the conflict model). The manager's cross-mod conflict advisory reasons about the mods it manages; it cannot see inside an editor mod's authoring intent, but classify can still report that mod's scope and whether it destructively targets core content. Two mods (editor- or hand-authored) that both Replace the same entity collide the same way regardless of how each was made.

Which tool for which job

You want to… Reach for
Author a mod visually, especially a single mod, a map/scenario, or a quick balance change The Pagonia Editor (EE's, in-game)
Author reproducibly — text/YAML, git-diffable, CI-validated, batch/programmatic, a multi-mod project pagonia-patcher + this repo's declarative format
Look up which GUID to target, what a recipe consumes, what changed between game versions, whether an edit is safe The reference catalog + docs (Catalog Browser, Database Overview, engine claims) — useful whichever authoring tool you use
Install, enable, profile, deploy, and roll back mods on a real install; bundle a reproducible collection pagonia-manager
Inspect or classify a downloaded mod pak before trusting it pagonia-paker

The reference layer (row 3) is the one every modder needs regardless of authoring tool — it is the companion to the editor, not an alternative to it.

See also