Sharing a mod on the Workshop

The Steam Workshop is where players find your mod. One pack is one Workshop item. This page covers uploading, who can see the item, updating it, and what a player sees after subscribing. The Workshop is not part of the demo.

Upload

uptime-mod upload packages your pack the way package does, checks the result again, and publishes it.

uptime-mod upload <dir> [--visibility private|friends|public]
                  [--change-note <text>] [--preview <image>] [--dry-run]

• The upload needs Steam running and signed in to an account that owns Uptime. The uptime-mod in the game’s ModSDK/bin folder can reach Steam. A copy built without Steam stops with a message and still runs --dry-run.
• --dry-run prints the plan and sends nothing. It also writes nothing into your folder. Run it first. The quickstart does.
• --change-note is the text Steam shows for this version. It may hold line breaks and is at most 8000 bytes.
• --preview is the item’s picture. It must be a JPG, PNG or GIF image of at most 1 MiB. Steam keeps the picture between uploads, so pass --preview again only to change it. An item uploaded without one has no picture until you add one.
• The exit code is 0 for a finished upload or dry run, 1 when the pack or Steam refuses it, and 2 when the command line is wrong. Nothing is sent when the pack has problems.

Steam sets the item’s title and description on the first upload only. The title is your pack id and the description is the id and version. Edit them on the item’s Workshop page. Later uploads leave them alone. Add more screenshots or a video on the item’s page too; the upload sets only the main picture.

The item carries tags that come from your manifest: its kinds (for example content or script), its content categories, and lua or rust for a script mod. It also carries the key-value tags mod_id and version, so an item can be found by its pack id.

Visibility

A new item is private. Only you can see it. Pass --visibility friends or --visibility public to change that. An upload without --visibility keeps the item’s current setting, so a public item stays public when you push an update.

The legal agreement

Steam keeps a new item hidden from everyone but you until you accept the Workshop legal agreement. When Steam says you have not, the upload still finishes and prints a warning with the link. Accept the agreement once for your account, and your items become visible at the setting you chose.

Rules for shared mods

Anyone can share a mod on the Workshop. These rules apply to every mod you upload, on top of Steam’s Subscriber Agreement and the Workshop legal agreement.

• Share only what you have the right to share. Your mod must be your own work, or work its owner lets you share. Don’t include art, models, music or code from other games or sites without permission. The Uptime art in the SDK examples may go into Uptime mods, as the SDK’s Terms say.
• Your mod stays yours. By uploading it you let RubyRackGames load and run it for every player who subscribes. You also let us show its name, picture and description, with your name, when we talk about Uptime mods.
• Keep it safe. A script mod runs in a sandbox. Don’t try to get out of it, read or send a player’s data, or slow down or crash the game on purpose.
• Keep it decent. No illegal content, hate, harassment, sexual content, or other people’s private details.
• Don’t pass a mod off as official. Don’t use the Uptime or RubyRackGames name or logo in a way that makes a mod look like ours. “A mod for Uptime” is fine.
• Mods are made by players. RubyRackGames doesn’t check or vouch for them and gives no warranty for them. Each player turns a mod on themselves.

To report a mod, use the Report button on its Workshop page. If a mod breaks these rules, or someone shows that it uses their work without permission, we can remove it from the Uptime Workshop. We tell the author why when we can.

We may change these rules. The version on this page is the one that applies.

Updates

The first upload makes the item and writes its id to workshop.json in your pack folder:

{
  "item_id": 3456789012,
  "published": true
}

Every later upload from that folder updates the same item. The id stays stable as long as workshop.json stays. Keep the file with your source and commit it. Do not edit it, and do not copy it to another folder you upload from: two folders with the same id update one item. The command refuses a file that is not a nonzero item_id. If you delete the file, the next upload makes a new item and the old one stays on the Workshop.

workshop.json never goes into the package. The upload does record the item id in the package’s uptime-package.json. That is how a player who is refused at a multiplayer join gets a Subscribe button for your pack. See Multiplayer.

Raise version in your manifest for each release. Players and the game tell two copies of a pack apart by its version and its hash.

What a player sees

A player subscribes on the item’s Workshop page. Steam downloads the item. The game then lists it in the Mods panel with a Workshop badge, next to the packs from the local mods folder. A pack from the Workshop goes through the same checks as a local pack, so a pack that validate accepts loads, and one it refuses does not.

A new item is listed off. Subscribing never turns a pack on. The player turns it on in the Mods panel, which is also where a pack that changes gameplay shows as one.

The Status column of the panel tells the player where the item stands:

Selecting a Workshop row shows an Open in Workshop button that opens the item’s page.

No pack found usually means the item was uploaded from a folder that was not a packaged pack. Upload with uptime-mod upload, which packages for you.

A dedicated server

A dedicated server needs no Workshop code. The operator downloads the item with steamcmd and points the runner at the folder it lands in. The steamcmd steps below are the operator’s procedure with Valve’s tool. The game does not run or test them. Only the sim-runner flags are the game’s. Steam keeps the app’s Workshop items in steamapps/workshop/content/4813880/<item id>/, and each of those folders is one pack, which is the layout --mods-dir reads.

An anonymous download works only if the Uptime app allows anonymous Workshop downloads, which is a Steamworks partner setting the publisher controls. Otherwise log in with an account that owns Uptime: replace +login anonymous with +login <account>.

steamcmd +login anonymous +workshop_download_item 4813880 3456789012 +quit
sim-runner --server --scenario garage-to-glory \
  --mods-dir <steamcmd folder>/steamapps/workshop/content/4813880 \
  --enable-mods com.example.my-mod

• --enable-mods takes pack ids, not item ids.
• The runner needs both flags together, and a world to build (--scenario or --world). It stops with a message when a pack is invalid.
• The server does not update items itself. The operator runs steamcmd again to fetch a new version, then restarts the server.
• A server that runs script mods can set their options with --mod-config. See Config.