Well, as disappointing as that is, I thank you all for the responses. This has at the very least, been a learning experience.

I take it there's no good way to read something from the script-output folder without a simlink then? Because the goal is to minimize the digging/editing of files that the user has to do.

Because, I'm thinking of doing something along the lines of:
1. Create a user setting
2. Check this event: 'on ...

This is useful information. However, I was hoping for some sort of external persistence. ie, still be able to save something from the game into an external settings/config file and read it on game start or something.

Yup. That was it. Thank you!

Well, good news-bad news situation now.
Good news: Adding the optional dependency on space-age allows me to find space-age entities in data.raw.
Bad news: Still cannot seem to do a substring replace on the filename for the space-age entity sprites.

For reference, I'm doing:

space_dir = "__space ...

I'm currently working on a mod where I need to replace sprite sheets for some of the existing entities. For vanilla entities, I was able to just grab the file names from data.raw and use filename:gsub(old_loc, new_loc) to change the base location for the sprite sheets. This is not working for the ...

What's the proper way to do that then? Or is there some sort of guide for how to do that you can link me to? As far as I can tell, the Lua io library is not included here, so using that seems out of the question. But, yeah, if you could point me toward how to properly do that, I'd appreciate it.

Each participant would play drastically less than the host. As the host, I would play for most of the day, mostly just cleaning things up and getting random productivity research done. But this had been happening for quite some time by the time they stopped getting achievements.

While hosting a multiplayer game, I (the host) received achievements, however, none of my friends earned any. I'm not sure exactly when this started taking effect, because they were earning achievements earlier on in the save.
Expected: All players earn achievements for completing appropriate tasks ...

Yeah. I was afraid that was going to be the case. I was really hoping to avoid the file swap. I know some older mods used to have their own settings files, but I don't think that's supported any more either.

I could, but I'd like to actually support quality as well as that of whatever quality other mods may add in. Otherwise I'd just hardcode the hidden entities for each quality.

Hello,
I'm currently working on a anti-phobia mod and it needs to replace sprites with ones less triggering in order to work. However, people who don't have that phobia don't necessarily need the swapped out sprites and so I wanted to have a setting to try to keep them vanilla if possible. Is there ...

Hello!
In a mod I'm working on I've got hidden entities that facilitate some logic, but the player should not really know that they are there. They're supposed to be hidden after all. Is there a way to specifically hide the quality icon on such an entity? And if so, what is the proper way of doing ...

Hello!
In a mod I'm working on I've got hidden entities that facilitate some logic, but the player should not really know that they are there. They're supposed to be hidden after all. Is there a way to specifically hide the quality icon on such an entity? And if so, what is the proper way of doing ...

Awesome! That was exactly what I needed.

It seems I've forgotten a few things in my question. Mostly that data.raw cannot be accessed in the control stage. So, I need a way to obtain a list of all of the qualities that is accessible in the control stage. Not for modification purposes, but so I can create an appropriate reference list for ...

I'm currently working on a mod where I need to get a list of all of the qualities in the game. This should account for all the qualities added in the qualities mod/expansion and/or any that are from some random mod.

I looked into using data.raw["quality"][?] but I'm not really sure what would even ...

Honestly, I find this change to be a vast improvement. I mean, the old system didn't work every time anyway. Random pipe placement would change how flow worked. So, I find it to be a nice update.

Upon exiting the game from the main menu, the game crashed.

For anyone wondering the solution to this exact issue:
on_player_changed_surface is the event that you need to look for.