Start here
This section takes you from a verified Windows game installation and no WolvenKit project to an installed, observable quest mod. It assumes no previous REDengine knowledge and no GitHub, Nexus Mods, or WolvenKit account.
The first result is deliberately small: First Signal activates one quest and one objective, waits ten real-time seconds, completes them, records a one-shot fact, and terminates. It has no world, scene, NPC, device, or audio dependency.
The supplied start and completed projects let you compare your work at each stage. The completed resources pass the book’s structural checks; the test guide shows you how to verify the player-facing result in your own game.
What a quest consists of
A .questphase is the coordinator, not the entire quest. Even this minimal
example crosses four ownership boundaries:
| Responsibility | Owner in Lab 1 |
|---|---|
| Execution, wait, fact guard, and termination | cqa001.questphase |
| Quest and objective definitions | cqa001.journal |
| English player-facing text | cqa001 onscreen localization resource |
| Attaching those mod-owned resources to game roots | CQA_Lab01_OneShot.archive.xl |
The first three are native CR2W resources packed into a game archive. The last is a loose ArchiveXL framework file. Installing only one layer cannot produce the complete behavior.
Use this reading path
- Install the pinned toolchain from a known starting state.
- Create a project and understand its layers.
- Extract and inspect one named vanilla questphase in a separate research project.
- Read Foundations for ownership, graph execution, identifiers, save-backed state, composition, and lifecycle.
- Build Lab 1: First Signal.
- Install, test, and reset without confusing an old save with a clean test.
Use the tested version set throughout. Newer versions may work, but editor labels, serialization, or framework registration can change; note the versions you actually use when reporting a problem.
What you do not need
You do not need a quest generator, a manifest compiler, a pre-extracted copy of the game, or access to the research repository used to develop this book. You will author and inspect the game resource model with WolvenKit, package native resources in an archive, register them with ArchiveXL, and test them in the game.
You also do not need to edit raw CR2W-JSON. The serialized files supplied with the completed checkpoint exist for review, deterministic diagrams, and structural comparison; the beginner workflow stays in WolvenKit.