Help? I'm making a mod?

So, I'm trying to make a mod, but I'm kinda stuck. See, it's my first mod, or anything. Now, I got a few of the things I wanted done, such as resetting soldier stats, and adding Alenium to fighters.

But beyond that, I'm confused. I'd like to edit how many alloys/how much Alenium drops from ship-based missions, along with tweaking several buildings, such as the living quarters, lab, and workshop.

Modding resource drops from ground missions is fairly difficult as you need to mod the map props which hold them. This, in turn, involves downloading the mapping files from the mapping subforum.

In terms of buildings - this depends on what you want to do but relevant changes should probably be made in buildings.xml.

For fighter which don't have a gc mission you can add it just at aircraft.xml. For ship based resources as alenium are mostly at powercores, so you need to edit that tiles specte files. You can do it same for alien alloy. But alien aloof is not at only power core.

Soldiers stats are at gameconfig.xml. Buildings are another big topic.

I can advise you to check Kabill's mods to see how to code.

Where exactly are the mapping tools?

You can download the mapping tiles here:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/9670-Unpacked-Game-Tiles-Required-for-Mapping%21

You don't actually need to use the mapping tools to edit them (they're all XML files) but if you want to use them they are in your roots Xenonauts directory.

Off the top of my head, the spectres which contain resources are:

UFO datacores (there's a different one for each UFO; I think only the undamaged ones contain resources)

Alien Power Core

Alien Reactor

Fusion Reactor

All the torpedo props

The light engine props

The heavy engine props

(Maybe) Anti-Grav generator

(Maybe) Hyperdrive

(Maybe) Singularity core

(The last three definitely drop an item but I don't remember if they have resources as well).

Note that changing the values for one of these will change it for all UFOs that carry that prop, and that the resource is per prop (so if a UFO has several of one kind of prop it will be applied multiple times). All of these can be found under assets/tiles/UFO; the data cores are in the specific UFO folders in that directory and some may be in the props folder.