Build a mod with an AI assistant

Ravenswatch ships no official mod support — no Workshop, no loader, no documented file format. An assistant asked “write me a Ravenswatch mod” with nothing else to go on will either refuse or invent a plausible-looking mod format that the game will never load. This page is how to give it the real one.

The short version

Paste this at the start of the conversation:

I'm modding Ravenswatch with the Ravenswatch Mod Manager (RSMM).
Read https://docs.rsmm.me/llms-mods.txt first — it is the complete
mod-authoring documentation in one file. Follow it exactly; do not
invent a mod format. Then help me build: <what you want>.

Any assistant that can fetch a URL will then be working from the real manifest grammar, the real content kinds, and the real CLI.

The machine-readable entry points

URL	What it is	When to use it
rsmm.me/llms.txt	What RSMM is, and the shortest path from “I want a mod” to a working one	An assistant that has never heard of RSMM
docs.rsmm.me/llms-mods.txt	Every authoring page, full text, one fetch	Building a mod
docs.rsmm.me/llms.txt	Link index of every docs page, grouped by section	Picking specific pages to read
docs.rsmm.me/llms-full.txt	The above plus ~30 pages of engine reverse-engineering notes	Working on RSMM itself

Use llms-mods.txt, not llms-full.txt, to build a mod. The full corpus is mostly vtable layouts and crash triage written for people extending RSMM’s engine support; feeding it to an assistant spends most of its context on material it cannot act on, and dilutes the rules that matter.

Rules an assistant gets wrong by default

These are the assumptions carried in from modding other games. State them explicitly if your assistant starts drifting.

A mod ships data, not code. The deliverable is a manifest.toml with [[content]] and [[patch]] blocks plus assets the SDK emits — never a Python script that pokes at game files. rsmm lint fails any *.py in a mod that isn’t a sanctioned lifecycle hook, so a script-shaped answer doesn’t just violate convention, it fails CI. See Mods ship data, not code.

Mod Lua never touches engine internals. No literal game addresses, no _internal, no peek/poke/read_*/write_*, no engine.resolve. Only the high-level R.* API. Also lint-enforced. If the capability you want doesn’t exist in R.* yet, that’s an RSMM change, not a mod change.

Don’t guess at content kinds. The list of what can be modded is fixed and each kind carries an honesty rating — confirmed, experimental, or guess. Registering a kind rated below confirmed raises unless the mod opts in with sdk.Mod(..., experimental=True). An assistant will happily invent a kind name that sounds right; rsmm lint will reject it. See Content kinds.

Ravenswatch is not a Unity game. This one is worth stating out loud, because a model that doesn’t know the engine reaches for the most common one. Ravenswatch is native C++ (FMOD, Epic Online Services, D3D12) — there is no Ravenswatch_Data/, no Assembly-CSharp.dll, no mono runtime, and BepInEx, Harmony, MelonLoader and DLL plugins will not load. RSMM’s loader is a winhttp.dll proxy with MinHook and an embedded Lua 5.4 VM.

A mod’s Lua entry point is init.lua at the mod root, and the API is R.* via local R = require "rsmm". Engine calls go through R.engine.call(name, ...) by semantic name against a hand-curated symbol map. There is no rsmm.call(), and the map is a few hundred named symbols — not the tens of thousands of raw game functions an assistant may claim are exposed.

Don’t hand-edit the game folder. Cooked asset paths under DarkTalesResources/_Cooking/ are ciphered, and RSMM tracks what it replaced so it can roll back. Hand-edits there corrupt that state. Every change goes through rsmm apply / rsmm restore --all.

Verify what it produced

An assistant’s mod is a hypothesis until the toolchain agrees. Three commands, in order — each one catches a different class of wrong:

rsmm lint            # manifest grammar, asset paths, the rules above
rsmm apply           # install into the game (rsmm restore --all rolls it back)
rsmm pack <mod-id>   # zip it for the registry

rsmm schema <kind> lists the vanilla ids available to clone; rsmm items list does the same for magical objects specifically. Run one and paste the output back rather than letting the assistant guess.

Every command that names a mod takes its id, not a path — rsmm lint MyMod, not rsmm lint mods/MyMod, which fails with no such mod.

Related

• Your first mod — the same loop, by hand.
• Mod authoring guide — scaffold through shipping.
• CLI reference — every command.