The development team at Firaxis which has just launched Civilization: Beyond Earth says that it plans to support mods in the long term and that it will be soon delivering yet another tool which will allow gamers to create their own custom content and then share it with the community.

The game supports the Steam Workshop feature of the Valve digital distribution service and that makes it easy for gamers to upload their creations, to find new experiences which are interesting and to rate the mods that they play.

At the moment, Civilization: Beyond Earth allows all players to access three tools: FireTuner, Mod Buddy and Nexus.

The first one is designed to make it easy to debug problems and to directly drop units in-game that are in progress to reproduce test situations.

Talking about the second tool, Firaxis adds, “ModBuddy has built-in editors for XML and Lua, and includes functionality for packaging a mod into a single file and uploading it to Steam Workshop. ModBuddy is based off Microsoft Visual Studio and is largely similar to its Civilization V counterpart, so folks experienced in modding Civilization V should have an easy transition over to Beyond Earth.”

The third addition, Nexus, introduces a range of tools which can be used to create and customize assets for the strategy title, which is necessary for the most ambitious mods, those aiming to create entirely new civilizations and leaders.

Civilization: Beyond Earth and future mods

Firaxis says that it plans to launch an entirely new tool called the World Builder for Civilization: Beyond Earth as soon as possible, which can be used to create customized tiles and maps, in order to make it easier to create custom situations for mods.

The Firaxis title might have been launched less than one week ago, but it has managed to inspire the community to create some interesting mods, most of them focused on experience gain for units and on new factions.

The launch of more tools will guarantee that bigger teams become involved in the coming months and can increase the long-term appeal of Civilization: Beyond Earth.

The game mechanics are very solid, but the overall experience does lack some personality, which good mods could deliver in spades.

Many members of the community have also been talking about a major mod which would integrate factions and ideas associated with Alpha Centauri, but there are some major intellectual property issues associated with its development and its delivery via Steam Workshop.

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