Create
Interested in creating your content? One of Wesnoth's best features is its extensibility. Players can create new maps, units, races, scenarios, art, music, and even entire campaigns!
Access to the "guts" of the game is both simple and difficult; if you have a UTF-8 text editor you have everything you need to build your own world. However, learning the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) takes some effort. This section will guide you through the process of creating and distributing your own content.
Remember you can always ask for assistance and collaborate with fellow content creators on the Wesnoth forums.
Read this first!
Before you modify or create anything, it is important to understand how the game stores and organizes its data. These articles will explain the game's directory structure and introduce the userdata directory.
What can I create, and how?
- WML Tutorial - Introduction to WML (In Progress)
- Maps - the battlefields the game is played on
- Scenarios - making things happen on a map, making it playable
- Campaigns - putting it all together into a campaign
- Multiplayer Scenarios and Campaigns - making your content accessible in multiplayer
- Custom Units
- Multiplayer factions and eras
- Distributing content - all about the add-on server
- Art - complete with tutorials!
- Music
- Writing
- Artificial Intelligence - how to create and modify AI behavior
- Translations - work on translating Wesnoth
- Authoring tools - tools for helping you write campaign WML
- Maintenance tools - tools for helping you sanity-check and maintain campaigns
What have others done?
There is a multitude of multiplayer factions and eras, multiplayer maps and discussion of campaigns on the Wesnoth forums
- Scenario and Campaign Development forum
- Multiplayer Development forum
- Faction and Era Development forum
- Guide to UMC Content
- Player UMC Reviews
If you want to be creative without having to invent an entire new campaign, see this thread on abandoned campaigns or this wiki-page. You should be able to pick one of these up and complete it with much less effort than doing an all-new one.
The world of Wesnoth
Not all campaigns take place in Wesnoth, but many do. There is definitely a certain flavor to campaigns that are intended to take place somewhere in the world of Wesnoth. Stake out a time period or a map locale and tell a story.
- The timeline of Wesnoth
- The geography of Wesnoth
- The races of creatures in Wesnoth
- Wesnothian poetry
Miscellaneous
- External Utilities - some extra tools for easier creating stuff
- WML Reference - a quicklink
- FAQ - if you have a question, post it
- Add-on server web interface - An alternate way to download user made content