Create an Item

Now that you’ve created a custom recipe and schematic, you’ll want to create a custom Item. For this tutorial, we’ll make an item named 'Doc Item'.

Creating the BP-Class

The item system is a bit complex, but to summarize it, we simply need to describe our item in a FGItemDescriptor class. To create it, go to the content browser in the Unreal editor. Go to the Mod-Root +Content/DocMod/ and create a new folder and call it "Items" to keep with our organization pattern so far. Then create a new Blueprint of type FGItemDescriptor in the folder. We’ll call it Desc_DocItem to follow Coffee Stain’s naming convention ("Desc" stands for descriptor).

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Describe the Item

Open the class and you should see the default settings of the classes' attributes. If not, just click on "Default Settings" and they should appear in the settings browser of the class editor. In here you will find multiple attributes with the different properties such an Item can have.

  • M Use Display Name and Description

    Because we have just a simple Item we need to check this (set the boolean to true) so that the item name and description are used directly.

  • M Display Name

    The item’s name in game. We’ll set this to "Doc Item".

  • M Description

    Set this to a simple description of the item. In our case, we use the text "This is the starter Item of the Doc mod."

  • M Stack Size

    Satisfactory has hardcoded item stack sizes. Items can stack to either 1 (One), 50 (Small), 100 (Medium), 200 (Big), 500 (Huge), or 50,000 (Fluid). Go ahead and pick one as you see fit.

  • M Can be Discarded

    Whether it can be trashed using the trashcan icon on your inventory. AWESOME sink settings are handled elsewhere. We’ll uncheck it so that you can’t throw the item into the trashcan. Ficsit does not waste.

  • M Energy Value

    This value describes how much energy this item should release if it gets burned in a generator. Our Doc Item won’t be a fuel item, so it shouldn’t be able to get burned in any generators, so we’ll use 0.0 for that value.

  • M Radioactive Decay

    If set to a value greater than 0, the item will cause the player to take radiation damage. Values should not be greater than 1. We’ll leave this at 0 for ease of testing our mod.

  • M Conveyor Mesh

    As we know, all items have 3-Dimensional representations for when they’re dropped on the ground or on a conveyer belt. So we’ll have to pick a 3D model. We have an example model you can use here. Import this the same way you imported the category image in the Recipe vs Schematic tutorial. Make sure that you edit each of the materials that were imported with the model and mark both "Used with Spline Meshes" and "Used with Instanced Static Meshes" in the DetailsUsage pane for each material. If you don’t do this, the textures won’t appear correctly in the game.

  • M Item Category

    This groups the item into a category, this affects where it shows up in the recipe list. We don’t need this so we leave it on "None", resulting in the item being categorized under "Other" ingame.

  • M Small Icon

    This is a simple texture image of the object used in the inventory to visualize what the given stack is. The recommend size is 64px for regular items, 256px for buildgun items. We have an image ready for use here. When using your own models, you can follow the tutorial here to generate icons that look like the ones in game.

  • M Big Icon

    This is the same as the small icon but can be higher resolution. The recommend size is 256px for regular items, 512px for buildgun items. Let’s just use the same icon file as before for simplicity.

Make the Item Available

The item is available to the user when it gets loaded at least once. Because Unreal loads assets with a just in time method, we somehow need to force the asset to be loaded. One way we can do that is by having our item used in a Recipe. Conveniently, we’re already planning to have the item be usable in a recipe so that the player can obtain it. Change the outcome of our already created recipe to this new item, or create a new recipe for it if you’d like to practice that.

And you’re done! Go ahead and Alpakit and check out your fancy new item in game.