Community Mod Spotlight - Modathon Season 3

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Ahoy! Ryagi here. This spotlight will be a little bit special, today we're not covering 1 mod but 3! All three of these mods will be from Modathon Season 3, which took place throughout late August (2024) and concluded September 8th.

If you're unfamiliar with these Modathons, they are essentially game jams, but for EUIV mods. Teams of 3-5 people organize themselves and make a mod in just a couple of weeks. These mods are then voted on by the modders and community, and the "Winners" given awards!

The Awards for Season 3 are as follows:

Cookie taxer

• 1st place Overall Winner
  
• General Mechanics
  
• Ooh Shiny! (Tied)
  
• Innovative

Last Breath: The Sunrise Invasion

• 1st Place: Alternate History

Indica Universalis - Shadows of Zomia

• 1st Place Regional Flavor
  
• Ooh Shiny! (Tied)

Wacky Events

• Awards: Meme Worthy

Mining and Ores reworked

• Overall Runner up
  
• 2nd place: General Mechanics

Shattered England

• 2nd place Alternate history
  
• Ooh Shiny! (Tied)

Today well be looking deeper at some of these winners: Cookie Taxer, Last Breath, and Wacky events. So without further Ado lets first take a look at Cookie Taxer first!
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Cookie Taxer

EU4 is a fantastic game of conquest, colonization, and state-building that we all know and love. But what if it was something more than that? What if it was also an idle game? What if the function of the empire was not to improve the lives back in the metropolis, but instead to produce cookies in ridiculous volumes, with a network of production stretching across the globe?

Cookies Cookie Taxer adds a new currency, Cookies. To gain a cookie, navigate to your economy tab, where you will see a big cookie. Clicking on this cookie gives you a cookie!


The cookies in the top-left go up with every click!

Now, you can keep clicking on this for days on end while paused, and give your hand a permanent disability. But wait, did you forget you have a country? A country full of people and land that can surely be harnessed for the glorious cause of cookie production!

Buildings There’s so much unused land in your country. Of course, this can be used to put down churches, workshops, and marketplaces, among other buildings. But that gives us ducats, and we aren’t here for ducats, are we? We’re here for cookies!

In the building menu, there are 9 new buildings. These cost cookies to build, but instead of giving you a one-time cookie increase like the clicking, they instead increase your monthly cookie income.


All 9 buildings, with custom artwork inspired by Cookie Clicker!

• Cursors: The cheapest building, where you employ hilariously underpaid workers to click the big cookie for you once a month.
  
• Grandma: An old lady, one with a lifetime of experience baking and a true mastery of the cookie form.
  
• Farm: A new agricultural revolution. Instead of growing cookie ingredients, cut out the middleman and grow the cookies directly!
  
• Mine: The earth’s formation was the ultimate oven, and the crust contains massive veins of cookie ore to unearth.
  
• Factory: A bit early for the industrial revolution, but nothing drives innovation faster than cookies.
  
• Bank: Cookies have become the primary currency of your state, so of course, your mints can regulate it!
  
• Temple: God finally answers your priests’ prayers!
  
• Wizard Tower: But sometimes, God isn’t enough, and you have to take the supernatural into your own hands.
  
• Shipment: EU4 is a game about colonialism, so of course, your overseas holdings will contribute to your cookie Empire.

Each building costs an order of magnitude more than the previous, with shipments costing 5.1 Billion cookies to build. Building costs also scale exponentially, increasing each time you build one. They are also limited by building slots as per normal, so true cookie scaling involves actually playing EU4 and expanding your country. Which, that must be really difficult now that your entire country is optimized for cookies and not actually playing the game, isn’t it? If only there was something else to spend cookies on, that would help the country...

Upgrades Upgrades cost a thousand cookies each, and also scale in their costs with each level. But they are well worth the investment, and will skyrocket the power of your country!

• Cookie Trebuchets: the enemy morale plummets when they see your forces feasting on cookies.
  
• Cookie Rations: and all the while, your troops are always ready and excited to fight, from the sugar rush!
  
• Steadfast Tax Regime: Cookie production is lucrative, so why not tax the extra income your people have now?
  
• Promote Sweet Immigration: Wages paid in cookies make foreigners eager to migrate and enlist.
  
• Hegemony of the Grandmatriarchs: Who would oppose their integration into the cookie regime? I wouldn’t!

Each upgrade gives a small bonus to the relevant modifier, but can be upgraded up to level 128. If you can afford it, your armies will be invincible, you will easily be able to afford it, enemy provinces will fold with just a touch, and your expansion will go entirely unopposed.


Clearly, our conquest has focused on a single building above all others...

Province Modifiers Your income scales linearly, but the cost of buildings and upgrades scale exponentially. So, eventually, you’ll simply be unable to afford anything, right?

Scattered across Europe are special provinces, carrying exponential buffs of your own! These modifiers need to be liberated from their ai rulers, who simply do not understand cookies like you do. And when controlled, will give significant buffs to your income. Some double the income from individual buildings (stacking multiplicatively), while others provide special bonuses of their own. Thousand fingers is one to watch out for, as you institute mandatory clicking during lunch breaks in every building. In addition, several upgrades provide a bonus for both grandmas and another building: after all, the elderly have wisdom to share, if only you are willing to listen. And a few other modifiers increase cookie production globally, by varying amounts.


Our advisors insist that we go to war with Bohemia. Not for the gold mine, or the great project in Prague, but instead this mountainous backwater, that holds the most valuable treasure of all.

A Note on Math and Loading Times Cookie Taxer supports cookie counts up to 999 undecillion. EU4 itself maximizes most numbers at 2.1 million. So there are hundreds of millions of lines of code supporting the mathematics this mod requires. Yes, you read that right. None of this actually causes any noticeable lag while playing the game, but it does massively increase loading times. If you are stuck on “creating checksum” for 5 minutes or more, it’s the game frontloading the mathematics!

Our Team CzerstfyChlep - UI and mod base
Xorme: Art
Sol_InvictusXLII - Math systems, buildings
LordVarangian - Events, province modifiers
Stiopa - Modifiers, metascripting

Get the Mod The mod is currently available on Steam Workshop.
Get it here!
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Last Breath: The Sunrise Invasion

Hello folks. Somehow, you managed to find your way to the spotlight for our mod: Last Breath The Sunrise Invasion. Since you are here, allow us to give you a little introduction to what this mod is about, what it contains and how it came to be.

There was an idea What if everyone died? Well, maybe not everyone, as that would make for a boring game. But what if the Plague, a.k.a The Black Death, was even worse than it was? What if, instead of killing ~1/3 of the population, it killed up to 90% of the people everywhere it struck? Surely, a world that has gone through such an apocalypse would look quite a bit different than the one we know from history books.

Plans upon plans With that rough idea, we began carving into finer edges, figuring out which regions would be the most and least affected and pondering what impact such a catastrophic event would have on the remaining populations. Very soon, we realised that the scope was a bit too grand for the relatively short duration of Modathon and thus, most of the world would remain only at those rougher edges. Nonetheless, we still tried our best to communicate ideas we came up with in at least some limited form. So, lets talk about what those were.

With so many people dying, the societies as they were would be utterly upended on all levels. The most immediately on-map visible impact is the collapse of centralised governments. Nearly all early medieval power structures were obliterated, and the people who survived organised themselves into small, tribe-like societies. Of course, not all regions were affected equally; some even managed to go through the ordeal relatively unscathed. And over time, some managed to rebuild.


Map of Europe, Maghreb and western-Asia in 1666

Of course, this wasnt the only change that occurred. The events of the Plague caused many people to lose all hope, including their hope in the divine that was supposedly protecting them. This mass crisis of faith was only further compounded by the collapse of religious networks, be it the Catholic Church in Europe or the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. This led to the religions fragmenting into many local denominations, with some people even abandoning the Abrahamic faiths altogether and resorting to the faiths of their ancestors. You can see this effect being most pronounced in places where the Abrahamic religions were still new and not yet deeply entrenched in tradition.

The depopulation of the Old World also means that the freed-up land is up for grabs, so to speak. Be it by the surviving locals, the reforming empires of the Far East or the civilisations in the Far West, who are enjoying a much more pleasant existence without European colonisation. And it is exactly the uncharted continent that is serving as the major civilisation centre, remaining wholly unaffected by the devastating Plague. Of course, nothing is perfect, and these nations will still have plenty of things to deal with. And perhaps, some of them might be inclined to look to the east and go figure out where the Sun Rises.

Map of colonial regions in Europe

Asia in Brief Asia is one of the regions that saw the fewest changes for the initial release, but we still tried to change things a bit to suit our vision. The Plague originated in Central-East Asia, so it was the first place to get, but also one that had the longest time to rebuild. Already, mostly stable centralised powers are a clear sign of this. Chinese Warlords managed to consolidate the lands of the Heavenly Kingdom, though there is still some hot debate over who exactly should hold the Mandate. Over in the southern drylands, quick and decisive political manoeuvring led to the restoration of the Persian Empire in the vacuum left behind by the collapsing Illkhanate and subsequent Plague. Speaking of collapsing, the Mongol Empire saw an even sharper decline, quickly fracturing into multiple small independent hordes.

Europe Back in Europe, things are still dire. Kingdoms lie in ruin, the lands of former civilisations are barren and slowly being reclaimed by nature, and despair hangs in the air. Yet, there are people who have lived through hell and now face the challenge of restoring their lands to their former glory and beyond.

The Highlands One group of survivors who managed to weather the seeming apocalypse are the hardy people of the Scottish Highlands. And while the effects of the Plague were still disastrous, causing the Kinrick o´ Scotland to collapse and fracture, the people didnt lose faith.

Well, to be more factual, many people lost faith in the Catholic Church due to them not being able to stop the spread of diseases and death no matter how many tithes and prayers were offered. Instead, people began to search for hope elsewhere and eventually found it in the practices of their forefathers. Soon, newly raised druids started spreading the restored faith throughout the land.

As the Plague receded, the Celts started to rebuild and organise. Soon, three main federations of tribes rose to prominence: The Islands, The Highlands and The Lowlands.
While the worst is already over, the road ahead will undoubtedly be long and paved with struggles.

Preview of the start of the game event in highland countries. There are quite a few issues to tackle.

Of course, overcoming great struggles should yield a great reward. To help you with that, a new mission tree will take you from dealing with the initial issues troubling your nation to reclaiming the lands formerly settled by Anglo-Saxons for their rightful Celtic owners.

Preview of the initial mission tree available to highland countries.

The Rest of Europe There are, of course, other places worth noting. The Basque, who managed to survive secluded in the Apennines, began spreading across the lands formerly held by Frankish and Iberian kingdoms. The Poles, who almost wouldnt noticed something happened, if it wasnt for the welcomed lack of German neighbours. In the Baltics, holdouts of Knightly Orders, who came there in preparation for the Biblical Apocalypse, which is sure to come any day now. And in the north, Odins shadow looms once again as the locals rejected the god on the cross, who clearly wasnt powerful enough to protect anyone.

The New? World But what about the lands across the ocean? You may ask. Well, the good news is that the Plague doesnt know how to swim, and thus, the continent was spared of all the death and suffering it caused in Eurasia. In other good news, dangerous sea journeys into the unknown are very low on the list of priorities for the surviving Hispaniards and Portuguese, so there are definitely no European colonies anywhere to be seen. The indigenous civilisations were left to their own devices. In the south, the Incan Empire has mostly consolidated its rule over the Andes and is enjoying somewhat of a golden age, in their case, quite literally. Further north, the Aztecs reign supreme, expanding their control over tribes far and wide. Only time will tell whether Doom or Glory awaits their empire. Meanwhile, the natives of the planes are mostly content with their migratory lives. And tho some unifications occurred in certain places; they dont seem to have grand imperial ambitions.

The High Kingdom of Vinland Speaking of the far north, there might be some Europeans, after all. In this timeline, the expeditions of Lief Erikson were significantly more successful; and with wise shamas prophesying a great catastrophe, many more people travelled to seek life in Vinland. And so, the colonies grew and spread across the north-eastern coast of this new continent. Over time, the clans established a system to aid each other in the struggles far away from their old home; Althing of Thanes and High King to oversee it.

Map of Vinland. Huh, the colours look familiar.

That worked well for a while. But as with all such institutions, this one, too, eventually has to face some turmoil. The sudden loss of contact with the homeland, the deepening relations with natives or internal power struggles are just a few of the issues the High Kingdom is facing.

Preview of generic Vinland mission tree.

Archaeology
Hello everyone, Lichark here! I’m thrilled to introduce the Archaeology feature weve been crafting for our mod. Weve put a lot of care and effort into it, and I cant wait to share all the exciting details with you.

The idea behind Archaeology
It might only be me but once I read the mod’s premise by Saxon I immediately started thinking about the Horizon and Fallout game series and how in those games you venture through a world that flourished before but now its only remaining signs are buried or overgrown by nature. I wanted to capture the same sense of adventure and discovery within the limits of the game.

The idea was to create another versatile narrative tool that’s not just a simple event, decision or mission but can interact with the aforementioned systems. For example we could set up a mission that the player can only complete if an Archaeology Site was finished in a certain way or a decision that the player can only take if it’s in a certain phase of excavation.

Gameplay Design of Archaeology
From a gameplay perspective, I wanted to mimic how the Monuments function in the game. What I mean by this is that each time you upgrade a Monument, random events can fire during its construction or in some cases, something specific can happen once the upgrading process is finished.
Archaeology Sites have five tiers. The tiers represent your progress in exploring/excavating the site. To advance, for example, from tier 1 to tier 2, you have to invest resources to start the process. Once your loyal subject starts working on the site, you’ll get progress reports or even narrative events periodically, and you can choose how to progress further. Reaching tier 5 requires significant resources, but generally speaking, every Archaeology Site has some kind of worthwhile reward it gives you upon completion. Among (us) the possible rewards are national modifiers, buildings, gold, monuments, and much more ( is possible but we havent had the time to implement them ).


( Some events from the Knife of Brutus Archaeology Site )
Visual Design of Archaeology
As I mentioned above, Monuments were a huge influence from a gameplay and even visual perspective. In my modding projects outside of the marathon I always tried to blend the stuff I add to the game with the already existing UI so it feels natural.

Because of that I had to find an appropriate place and design for it. After some (failed) iterations I settled on the bottom of the Buildings tab of the Provincial Window. It had some nice looking free space waiting to be filled with content.
From then on, I just modified some buttons from the base game to fit in the new interface and changed the background to a stylish brown and added a banner above it all with an amphora icon for looks ( that I later modified to act as a sort of tooltip icon).



Due to time constraints, the unique pictures embedded in the tier buttons were all generated using AI image tools. While it’s awesome that we have access to these tools, I would have designed these icons myself if we had the time. They look good on their own, but you lose a lot of control over the art direction and finer details when using image generation. While it’s possible to correct some things when using images that are this small, they can still look out of place.

Last Breath While, of course, we are slightly disappointed that we could not bring in more flavour and had to restrict ourselves to only small regions, we are overall happy with how this project turned out. For most of our team, this was the first large project, and for some of us, even the first proper EU4 project. We got to try new things we hadnt played with before, so it was certainly a valuable learning experience for all of us.

Wed like to thank everyone for giving our mod a try and enjoying it. Wed also like to thank Chewy, Minnator, and the rest of the staff for organising the Modathon.

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Wacky Events Wow.
Hello World!

We, the Wacky Events team, in order to create a quite silly mod, establish madness,
and insure the instability of EU4 players minds, with the blessings of the Modathon admin team,
do ordain and establish this Insanity of Europa Universalis modding.

I am Cetai, one of the crew presenting you the product of 2 weeks of hard work and procrastination.
The process behind the creation of our mod went something like this:
Our veteran team of modders have debated long and hard about the type of mod we wanted to create, from full movies added to events
to the Italian Wars. Then we just slapped on the silly hat.

But enough of the behind the scenes stuff, lets jump right into the mod!


So, what are the Wacky events? Or precisely, where are they? A great question, dear reader. The scope of the mod
allowed all of us to work independently on stuff, and pursue different carriers in acting and music.
Initially, the idea of moving pictures was the target, however we realized early that in two weeks this would be quite impossible to do properly.
This lead to the change of focus to individual events, while Kyhler and Sealand began to work on a fantastic musical piece never before seen in EU4.
A truly unique wonder.


To me, these two weeks were a great opportunity to learn more about custom_windows and interface modding in general.
What came out of it? The "Drinks around the world" window, where the sense of expolration meets the haphazard throwing of icons on each other.
But as with the theme of this mod, the music gives clues where one should go.


Meanwhile, the rest of our team werent slacking off. There are almost 50 unique events inside our mod, like the legendary horse Glitterhoof appearing from the CK series, the Japanese becoming Fetishist upon discovering Manga, to Julius Ceasar returning via timey-wimey stuff.

And of course, the wackiest of all, the random switch of countries. Make sure to discover them all!



With this, I close the curtain upon the Wacky Events mod for the Modathon 2024 Season 3 series. Thank you for your attention, and may all the Gods bless you!
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Outro
Ryagi back to wrap things up for us. You can find all 3 of the mods showcased here today on steam workshop:

• Cookie Taxer
  
• Last Breath: The Sunrise Invasion
  
• Wacky Events

And Links for the Modathon award winners we couldnt cover in full today:

• Shattered England
  
• Mining and Ores Reworked
  
• Indica Universalis - Shadows of Zomia

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the EU4 modathon Season 3! Wed highly encourage anyone remotely interested in modding to participate in one of these modathons at least once. Not only is making silly mods a lot of fun, its a great way to learn if you want to get into the modding sphere! The team environment ensures you never end up biting more off than you can chew and always have a helping hand to guide you.

You can find more information about the modathons over on their discord server at: https://discord.gg/GkE7xsCHET
And if you are looking for help with modding, youre always welcome at the EU4 Mod Coop: https://discord.gg/vmmPFndWVS

Till next time!