Welcome to my guide on making custom units for Rusted Warfare - RTS.

Please note that some information may be inaccurate or unecessary as we don't know a lot since it's recent release on PC, if you see something wrong please comment below, thank you!

To make a unit you will be making a new sprite and editing a text file to add configuration and such.

I will be going through this exclusively with the paint program called Gimp https://www.gimp.org/ as I find it very easy to handle with transparency and scaling images, which is what you will be doing a lot of with making units.

If you prefer the likes of photoshop, it shouldn't be too hard to follow on!

First of all head over to the directory where all custom units will be placed:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rusted Warfare\assets\units

You will notice that there are a few vanilla units already here. These files can be edited for singleplayer preference but you can't use modified vanilla units on multiplayer.

To keep things simple, we will use one of these units as an example, I'm going to take 'test_tank' for this tutorial.


Once you have copied over that folder you can now rename it to anything you like, this won't effect the name of the unit in the game. In this case I will call it guide_tank

Let's open up our new folder and see what's inside:

While I'm unsure if it's required, let's just rename these files respective to the folder name, the textures don't need to be renamed unless you prefer to, you will later have to rename some text in the .ini file.

Before we get into the advanced parts of the guide, let's start editing our tank now!

Open up gimp and we'll start off with guide_tank.png, this is clearly going to be the base of our unit, where any turrets and such will be placed on.

Zoom in on the image and you will see 3 pixelated tanks, why 3? Well this is for animating your object, this can be very simple and I will explain in the next section. Below is an image breaking down how this recognises each of your animations:


This image has the width of 48 pixels (you can see on top of gimp 48x30), since this tank has 3 animations, each tank should be 16 pixels wide at most (48 divided by 3)

It is possible to leave it without animations and rescale the image if it's too complicated or if you make a turret!

In this case, for fun and a great example we can make our tank change color 3 times as it drives.

Also a quick tip if you plan to add filters to your units I suggest you use the magic selection too to select all the green parts then press CTRL + i, this in invert your selection so your filters will not edit the green. The green seems to be how the game reads to change the color for team recognition.


Now you can save your changes and click File -> Overwrite guide_tank.png

Now before you can even test this out, you must open up the .ini file. (You can use wordpad, but I recommend notepad++)

I'm going to leave the guide at this for the moment and just show you that you can rename the unit to test it out in Sandbox mode.



If you opened it up with notepad++ you should see this.

1): Rename to what you want your unit to be called in-game.
2): Make sure these are the exact names as the files in your folder.



Save and try it out!



I will finish the guide as soon as I can!