This guide assumes that you already have at least a basic knowledge of C#, and have set up a modding environment as explained on this wiki. Without both of those things being true, this likely won't be a very useful resource for you.

Making a custom hero is very much like Making a Custom Tower. You should be familiar with the information in that guide before reading this one, as some repeated information will be ommitted.

The tl;dr of making a custom Hero is that you just make a custom Tower, but use the ModHero and ModLevel classes in place of ModTower and ModUpgrade. If you're someone who likes flying by the seat of your IDE's autocomplete, then that might be as much information as you need to get started.

ModHero

Required Properties

Cost: Same as with ModTower

BaseTower: Same as with ModTower

DisplayName: Same as ModTower. This will usually be the name of the Hero, like "Benjamin"

Description: Same as ModTower. The overall description of your Hero as it appears in menus.

Title: The short description of your hero, like "Code Monkey" for Benjamin

MaxLevel: Instead of the "___PathUpgrades" properties, you use this to define the max level of your hero. Like with those properties, don't preemptively set this to a higher number than the amount of ModHeroLevels you've actually created so far.

Level1Description: The description of the level 1 upgrade of your hero. You won't be making a ModHeroLevel for level 1, just 2 and up, so this is defined here.

XpRatio: How fast the hero levels up. Quincy, Gwendolin, Striker Jones, Obyn and Etienne have 1.0; Ezili, Pat Fusty, Brickell, and Sauda have 1.425; Benjamin and Psi have 1.5; and Captain Churchill and Adora have 1.71.

Abilities: The total number of abilities that you've added for your Hero.

Required Methods

ModifyBaseTowerModel: Same as ModTower. This is defining the behavior of your Level 1 Hero.

Visuals

You'll want to include 4 images for your base hero:

• [Name]-Portrait: Same as ModTower portrait
• [Name]-Icon: Same as ModTower icon
• [Name]-Button: The hero button that's used in menus showing which hero you have active
• [Name]-Square: The newer square button that's used in the revamped hero selection screen

Also for the revamped hero select screen, you can override the NameStyle, BackgroundStyle and GlowStyle properties to be the TowerType.___ of the heroes you'd like to copy the respective elements of.

Example

A full example from the Industrial Farmer mod

public class IndustrialFarmer : ModHero
{
    public override string BaseTower => TowerType.BananaFarmer;

    public override int Cost => 1400;

    public override string DisplayName => "Norman";
    public override string Title => "Industrial Farmer";
    public override string Level1Description => "Collects nearby bananas. Your next Banana Farm is free.";

    public override string Description =>
        "Norman collects your Bananas and helps you expand your farming operations.";


    public override string NameStyle => TowerType.Gwendolin; // Yellow colored
    public override string BackgroundStyle => TowerType.Etienne; // Yellow colored
    public override string GlowStyle => TowerType.StrikerJones; // Yellow colored


    public override int MaxLevel => 20;
    public override float XpRatio => 1.0f;

    public override int Abilities => 2;
}

ModHeroLevel

Like with ModUpgrades, you'll want to declare these classes using your ModHero class's name as the type parameter to specify it's for them

public class CustomLevel2 : ModHeroLevel<MyCutomHero>
{
    ...
}

Required Properties

Level: Instead of Path and Tier like ModUpgrade, you just have this to signify what level this corresponds to.

Optional Properties

AbilityName: If this upgrade adds an ability, then you must indicate the DisplayName field of its AbilityModel hero

AbilityDescription: What you want the displayed description of the ability to be

Required Methods

ApplyUpgrade(TowerModel towerModel): Just like ModUpgrade, apply the effects to the tower model that you want leveling up to provide.

If you're adding a new Ability with this upgrade, as well as making use of the AbilityName and AbilityDescription properties, you should also be sure to include a line like this when constructing your AbilityModel.

abilityModel.addedViaUpgrade = Id;

This will help make sure the Ability is shown properly for this upgrade/level in the Hero screen.

Visuals

Like with ModUpgrades, if you include an image named after your ModUpgrade with "-Portrait" following it, then your hero will use that as its portrait if it's at least that level.

Example

A full example from the Industrial Farmer mod

public class Level7 : ModHeroLevel<IndustrialFarmer>
{
    public override string Description => "Range is increased.";
    public override int Level => 7;
    public override void ApplyUpgrade(TowerModel towerModel)
    {
        towerModel.range += 15;
        towerModel.GetBehavior<CollectCashZoneModel>().attractRange += 15;
    }
}