I'm seeing a couple of things here. It does look like you have a misconfiguration in your lightsaber ThingDefs. Try turning on development mode (Main Menu -> Options -> check the Development Mode option) and starting a game. You'll see what I mean. When you start a game, you'll get this error:

MakeThing error: MeleeWeapon_WhiteLightsaber is madeFromStuff but stuff=null. Assigning default.

This means that you're defining the lightsabers as something that's made from different materials (steel, silver, etc), but then in the scenario, you're not saying which material your white lightsaber should be made from.

It turns out that this triggers a pretty bad bug in Prepare Carefully where the mod gets stuck when trying to spawn items into the map--it just hangs there forever until you kill it. I'm going to need to fix that.

I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do with your mod, so I can't say what the right advice is, but you've got a couple of options:

1) You could change the lightsabers to not be "made from stuff". There are pluses and minuses with this approach. You would need to rethink how you've set up a lot of your definitions related to crafting lightsabers in the game if you decided to go that way.

2) Alternatively, in your scenario, you need to choose a material for the starting white lightsaber by doing this:

<li Class="ScenPart_StartingThing_Defined">
<def>StartingThing_Defined</def>
<thingDef>MeleeWeapon_WhiteLightsaber</thingDef>
<stuff>Steel</stuff>
</li>

In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It definitely revealed a bug in my mod that I will need to fix. Good luck with the mod--it's fun!

Thanks for the quick response! That is very interesting that my bug helped you find a bug, haha. Typical me style, lol. Well, I understand what is going on here from your explanation. I think what happened was at one point I was allowing other materials to be used and then decided to switch to steel only as I was slightly confused about how to tell it the difference between required materials and optional materials. If I added like gold it wanted gold AND steel for some reason, so I just simplied it to go back later and upgrade it and I must of missed something when I was setting it back to just steel.

My tests found that gold was a bad idea to use anyways BUT someone MIGHT want to do it despite how bad gold is for a sword.

Thanks for the code nugget there, I understand what its saying. Now, you are setting it so all white lightsabers default as steel correct?

I think I will give this a shot, but I know this is beyond the scope of what would be asking for help with mod compatability, but do you happen to know how to tell it the difference between manditory and optional materials?

I know the first section you tell it what types, and the 2nd section you sort of do it again and tell it the quantity. Does that make sense? That is how I understand it works, but I'm not sure how I would do this. Oh, is it something more like instead of me saying <Steel></Steel> it would be like <Metallic></Metallic> as really I think all the metals would be nice to use if they player wants to use them. And MAYBE uranium too, and again, all these things sound like mostly bad ideas since their combat properties are lower than steel or plasteel. But just adds some variety.

Anywho thanks for the info, going to go test that now. And will report back my findings. And if you can help me with the other question and don't mind, would appreciate that as well. As you probably know much of the info for modding is somewhat hard to find online, and what is there is limited in scope. Thanks again, and have a good weekend!

UPDATE - I think that did the trick. I see why that could happen, I should of had Metallic somewhere in the default of all lightsabers or something like that. But I think your suggestion worked. Thanks :0 Also if you can shed light on my other question that would be great, if not no worries.

I've never modded items, so I don't really know how that works. If you want to look at making the items so that they aren't "made from stuff", you can take a look at Core/Defs/ThingDefs_Misc/Weapons_Guns.xml and look at how the guns are set up. Look at "BaseMakeableGun" and "Gun_Pistol." You'll see that the guns all have a <costList> defined that looks like the list of materials needed to craft them--but I'm not sure.

Good thinking, normally that is what I do is check out Core when I am not sure about something. Not sure why I didn't think about that this time, haha. Thanks again.