Modding Spotlight: Towards New Horizons

Hey Anno Community,

Today is a great day for Anno 1800, as it marks the release of the “New Horizons” mod! After 5 years of hard work and effort, we wanted to celebrate the release of this highly anticipated mod together with its creators and the Anno Community as a whole. The team behind this massive project includes Taubenangriff, jje1000 and Hier0nimus – well-known names in the Anno modding community.

Who can explain the content of the mod better than the people behind this big project? So, we asked them:

What can Anno 1800 fans expect in the New Horizons mod?

In Vanilla Anno 1800, there are four regions, the Old World, New World, Arctic and Enbesa, each with their own population and production. In New Horizons, we are adding a fifth region, Horai, which is inspired by East Asia, mostly Japan and China. Horai itself has two population tiers, as does each Colony region, and its residents want products like porcelain, tea, sake and koto instruments. On top of that, the session comes with its own challenges and mechanics: First of all, your farm production in Horai is going to be regularly interrupted by monsoons, something you might have already experienced in the Seasons of Silver scenario. If you need additional workforce and money, you can provide your Horaiese population with street food, and if you look to complete fancy architecture projects, you can rebuild the Wonders of Horai on your islands.

Not only does New Horizons contain an Asian-inspired session, it also adds a sixth population tier in the Old World at the end of the progression where Investors can now upgrade to Magnates, who turn the endgame economy on its head by providing little income for high efficiency, and it should come as little of a surprise that Magnates primarily want goods from the Horai session.

As with previous Modding Spotlights, we’ve prepared for you an extensive Q&A with the team behind the mod – both about their modding experience as well as about the mod itself. Without further ado, let’s dive into it!

Q&A, Part 1: Modding experience

What would you advise someone who wanted to get into modding Anno?

Discovering your creative side takes a lot of effort and time, and you will never find out about it if you do not start off just creating things. Creative skills can be learned, and ultimately you do not have to be the best in your discipline to create cool stuff and have fun with it. It takes a bit of stubbornness and persistence to transform your vision into reality.

But most importantly, do it for the fun, not for the result. And you will always have learned something valuable in the process.

Did you have any prior modding knowledge or specific skills (programming, 3D Art, UI Design, …) when starting to mod Anno?

We had and have a lot of talent on the team that was involved, and what we can do covers pretty much the entire palette that you might need when creating and modding games. That reached from being very capable at reverse engineering and programming to bringing 3D art skills or general knowledge of how to code mods for Anno 1800. But most importantly, no single person on the team could do everything, so it was very important to assign tasks based on who could do what. This collaboration was very important during development, because this way every task could be handled by someone who knew what they were doing.

The skillsets on the team could be very specific, we even had someone on the team who specialised in Sound Engine modding, which became very handy when porting and implementing resident voice lines from other Annos into 1800, because none of the others on the team could have done that. Some of us also used New Horizons to expand and practice their skillset, like learning and improving 3D art skills with and for the project, which was a great learning opportunity.

How did you get into modding? What prompted you to create Anno 1800 mods specifically?

Taubenangriff: I used to do record building on Anno 2070 a lot before 1800 came out. That was roughly the time where I learned general programming. Then 1800 came out and it all started at a white empty Plaza tile that was missing from the release, but which I wanted to build. So, I tried my luck on it, it worked, and through that I got to know a lot of awesome people that also tried their luck with modding Anno 1800. Mind you, that was even before there was a modloader for the game.

Well, in the midst of that pioneer era of modding, we started getting better and better and eventually went crazy with our ideas – that is when New Horizons was born out of pure hybris and megalomania. Well, and now 5 years later I’m here and it’s done.

Not too long ago we did an interview with Hier0nimus. You can check it out here.

Q&A Part 2: Behind-the-scenes of the “New Horizons” mod

For the second part of this spotlight, we were of course very curious how the team handled the development of the “New Horizons” mod.

Did you know what you were committing yourself to when starting the project?

No, absolutely not. This project is the result of the pure stubbornness to complete a vision that we came up with years ago. We knew that this project was not going to be easy, it was going to be a lot of work, but the scope kept on growing and growing – which primarily came down to increasing standards. When you compare the visual quality of the early Anno 1800 mods with mods that are more recent, there is a huge apparent upgrade, and that upgrade coincides with our skillset and toolstack growing.

So, not only did we create all of New Horizons, but we also updated old assets multiple times, because we just knew that we could do better than what we created earlier.

You’ve mentioned multiple times in reddit posts or videos the different contributors to the mod. How big of a team worked on this mammoth project? How did you collaborate?

We always had a core team, which for the first two years or so pretty much consisted of Taubenangriff doing art content by himself, but the core team expanded to 2-3 people, namely bringing in jje1000 to create and overhaul a lot of art assets and Hier0nimus for coding and item work. Moreover, a lot of people joined to contribute in the form of individual projects over time, where they would create a single part of the mod, i.e. a set of ornaments, a single wonder or the magnate houses. So, in total around 15 people worked on the project but they never did so at the same time.

To organize our effort, we set up half-yearly milestones where we would define tasks in advance and distribute the work among the team, and regularly shared our progress internally, as well as using version control to backup, manage and bring together our work.

But we also regularly stepped in to help each other complete our tasks, so that everyone could bring in their skillset where it was suited for best. This was perhaps the most important part in getting the mod to a reasonable quality level, being pragmatic about who should commit on doing what on often very limited time and resources.

Well, we know Anno 1800 doesn’t always make modding very… straightforward. What were your main challenges? How did you tackle them?

The main challenge during the development was that we could often not edit certain parts of the engine – like islands. Often, we then wrote our own tools to give us those possibilities for New Horizons, which were often then made public and have since become widely used in the modding community.

What is something players will have to get used to that they don’t know from the unmodded Anno 1800?

The regular seasons in Horai will certainly be a challenge for players, as storage space suddenly is a central resource. You will need to stockpile 30 minutes’ worth of farm production to get through a monsoon unimpeded, and that means you will need to invest extra space into building storages – but there is only so much building space to work with, and every tile that goes towards storage cannot be used for production buildings.

If you install the optional Item Rebalancing that comes alongside New Horizons, your items also suddenly will do different things – as an example, you cannot circumvent Steam Carriage production with Susannah Brightwoman anymore. But I want to stress the optionality of this, this is meant to be part of the mod, but ultimately up to your choice whether you care about better balancing or not.

If other players want to know more or have questions, where would you want them to go?

I reckon this is pretty much a standard answer by now, but you can always find us on the Anno 1800 modcorner discord. Don’t be shy, join and ask your questions there .

And you can visit the New Horizons modpage on mod.io: https://mod.io/g/anno-1800/m/new-horizons

A big thank you to the “New Horizons” team for taking the time for this modding spotlight and congratulations once more on the release of the mod!

We love seeing the Anno 1800 community still going strong and are sure this long-awaited mod will make many in the community very happy.

That brings us to the end of today’s blog. Make sure to check out “New Horizons” on mod.io and as usual: leave a nice comment over there for the mod creators if you enjoy their work.