Read the following to know if this guide is for you:

It's easy enough to get started, so this tutorial does not cover troubleshooting why a tool isn't working or why you installed it improperly- this guide assumes you're not missing two halves of a brain and are able to follow the instructions in a README. With that in mind, if you have questions about something relevant to the process outlined in this guide, try asking in the discord or, even better, searching the discord message history. There's a lot of good info there and common questions have been answered ad nauseum over the years.

1. Run UXM

Start up UXM, it should look like this:

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UXM is a tool used to unpack all your game files- you need this to be able to make your mod and what you'll use to restore your original install if you screw up too badly. Browse to your sotfs exe and unpack it, then exit out of UXM. Some people will tell you to patch it, I disagree- since we're using modengine and loose params, there's no point in patching.

2. Create a project in ParamStudio

When opening param studio for the first time, you'll see an empty editor. Go to File → New Project and give your project a name. For this tutorial, its name is "HelloWorld". When you go to make a directory, since I like to keep everything separated, you'll make a new directory called "mods" where we'll store all our active mods. This mods directory is just a subdirectory in the Game folder. Then tell ParamStudio where your sotfs executable is. This tells ParamStudio what type of game this is and what its absolute path is. Next, you'll want to check "Use Loose Params" and "Load Default Row Names". If you don't, then don't follow this tutorial. Next, hit "Create" and you will have a new project.json file in your HelloWorld directory.

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3. Decrypting your regulation file

It used to be that you'd need an additional program (yapped) to do this, but because there were several different versions (main, honeybear, unf*cked...) and each of them unfortunately causes the weapon debuff bug, I've added the decryption functionality to ParamStudio and fixed the weapon debuff bug starting with ParamStudio version .5. All you have to do is create a new project like we did in the previous step, load that project, and hit "Save". Boom. Now the encrypted enc_regulation.bnd.dcx in your Game folder is backed up as enc_regulation.bnd.dcx.bak and the new enc_regulation.bnd.dcx file in its place is decrypted. Now that that's been decrypted, we can start modding!

4. Tell modengine where to look