As I'm sure you're aware, in general, mods should use the menuTag and menuButton variables to add new categories:

"menuTag":"damsel", // name of category/title in build menu

"menuButton":"livestock", // which build menu to appear under

These are assigned on the objects themselves which ensures all the mods play nicely with each other.

However, for what you're creating, which sounds like more of a UI total conversion I think it's safe to edit the variable in gui.data. If you create a file with the following in:


Here the order that the categories appear under each subheading ("tanks", "equipment", "staffObjects", "livestock", "scenery" and "facilities") determines the order they appear in the menu.

You can add as many categories to these lists as you like. Thankfully, if no objects of a category are detected in the game, it will be omitted.

Warning: If two mods try to overwrite the gui.data variables though, the one higher in the list will take priority. This is why you should only use this for a global UI mods and not for individual animal mods.

You should add a note declaring this in the notes on the workshop, so players know to only install one UI mod at a time (there may only be one at the moment, but there may be more in the future).

Hope that makes sense. :)

Thanks much! This is super helpful :)

EDIT: I just re-read your post and actually it doesn't sound like a UI mod after all (sorry misunderstood). So actually I wouldn't recommend doing this after all. I've left the information up for reference, but I wouldn't do this if it's a mod which is supposed to be played with lots of other mods as only one mod is allowed to edit this variable at a time.