Architect Studio

Organise the Architect menu from inside the game, without restarting.

DROPDOWN GROUPS

- Create a group, put buildings into it, take them out.
- Order the members of a group, by dragging or with up/down arrows.
- Force a category on a whole group: its members are moved there, and any you add later follow. Without this, a group has no category of its own and splits into one button per category its members happen to sit in.
- Grid or list menu, and choice of icon source.
- Delete a group. Groups provided by another mod are dissolved and hidden instead, since their def is recreated on every startup; a button restores them.
- Warns when a group is spread across several categories, where the game silently produces several separate buttons.

CATEGORIES AND SUBCATEGORIES

- Create a category, or a subcategory when Better Architect Menu is present.
- Reorder with up/down buttons, among siblings.
- Change the label, colour and icon of any category, vanilla ones included.
- Icon picker browsing every icon already loaded by your active mods.
- Empty categories greyed out, with a building count that includes their subcategories.

Nothing is written to the game's def files, nor to another mod's: everything is stored in the mod settings and reapplied on startup. The mod can be added to or removed from a game in progress.

Interface in English and French. Designed to stay usable without a keyboard, with the Steam Deck in mind.

WORKS WITH

Detected automatically, none required — the settings screen shows which ones were found.

- Better Architect Menu: subcategories, and invalidation of its display caches.
- Architect Icons: category icon picking.
- Float Sub-Menus: nested subcategories in the pick menus.
- Searchable Menus: adds a search field to those menus by itself.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

- Architect Icons: Improved, and Optional Icons for Architect Icons — more icons for the picker to offer, since it browses whatever your active mods have loaded.
- Bradson's Main Button Icons (Forked + Expanded) — the same treatment for the bottom bar.
- Basic Dropdowns, and Basic Dropdowns - Extended — around a hundred ready-made dropdown groups, which this mod then lets you edit, extend or take apart.
- Even More Linkables Dropdown Patch — dropdowns for linkable buildings.

IF I GO QUIET

If I do not answer within a reasonable time after being contacted, anyone may freely update this or any other of my mods, including publishing a continuation of it. All credit must be preserved.

AI-GENERATED

This mod's code was written with Claude Code (Anthropic) and its images generated with DALL-E (OpenAI), under human direction, review and testing. Stated openly: designing with these tools is my job.

THANKS

Claude Code (Anthropic) and DALL-E (OpenAI).
ferny (fernyrepos) for Better Architect Menu and Colored Categories, MIT licensed, whose study showed where the right hooks were.
bymarcin for Architect Icons, kathanon for Float Sub-Menus and Searchable Menus.
Andreas Pardeike for Harmony.

See ATTRIBUTION.md. This mod is MIT licensed.