Parchment¶
Parchment is a Stardew Valley framework which allows mod authors to create fully customizable in-game books. You describe the book as data and Parchment handles the rest!
A Parchment book is JSON, along with some sprites (optional, if using default book texture).
Start here¶
-
Write a book, load its art, register it and hand the player something that opens it.
-
Units, layout, art, conditions and actions.
-
The full schema for books, pages and every element you can put on a page.
What a book looks like¶
{
"Format": "1.0.0",
"Id": "{{ModId}}_CampingGuide",
"TintColor": "165 42 42",
"Pages": [
{
"Id": "cover",
"Elements": [
{ "Type": "Title", "Text": "Camping Guide", "Alignment": "Center" },
{ "Type": "Heading", "Text": "by Linus", "Alignment": "Center" }
]
},
{
"Id": "tents",
"Elements": [
{ "Type": "Heading", "Text": "Pitching a tent" },
{ "Type": "Divider", "Sizing": "Fill" },
{ "Type": "Paragraph", "Text": "Find level ground, away from the river." },
{
"Type": "Image",
"ItemId": "(O)24",
"Scale": 4,
"Alignment": "Center"
}
]
}
]
}
That's a two-page book with a cover, a heading, a rule, some prose and a parsnip that carries its own tooltip.
The ideas to know¶
Elements stack. A page is a list of elements laid out top to bottom. Text wraps to the page, pictures centre themselves if you ask and everything below closes up when something above it disappears.
Everything is measured against your art. Padding, widths and margins are in the pixels you drew them at, and they scale with the sprite. Units and scale is short. Read it before you spend an afternoon on a misplaced border.
Anything can be clickable. Action isn't special to buttons. Put one on an image and you have a bookmark. Actions are trigger actions, so a button can turn a page or give the player an item, run a quest or anything else the game can do.
Anything can be conditional. Condition takes a game state query, re-checked while the book is open. A page can show one thing in winter and another in spring, or hide a section until the player has met someone.
Chapters are one-way doors. Pages sharing a ChapterId form a section you can't turn your way out of. The only way in or out is a button. Useful for a table of contents, an appendix or a book that wants to control where the reader goes.
Getting started¶
Your first book walks through the whole thing: the data patch, the item that opens it and the art.
To open a book without an item, from a tile action, the console, or another mod's C#, see Opening a book.
If you'd rather read the schema directly, start at Book. If something looks wrong in-game, Troubleshooting is organised by what you see.
Versioning¶
Every book declares a Format, which is the version of Parchment it was written against. For most situations, this should always be set to Parchment's current version number.