Ethnicity Guidelines

On this page, we will explain everything you need to know to edit ethnicities.

The ethnicity files are located in mod\Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth-2\common\ethnicities and sorted in files by race. The first thing to mention, these files update on the change, so you don't have to reload the game to see them affect the Ruler Designer.

Scripted Values

When you open such a file in any text editor like Notepad++, the first lines you will see are scripted values. They always start with @.

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Usually, these values are color coordinates the races share across the files like the shades of the blue eye color.

Ethnicity Basics

There may be a few ethnicities in the file, but all ethnicities share the same template:

<Ethnicity_Name> = {
	template = "ethnicity_template"
	<Gene_Name> = {
		<Gene Chance> = { name = <Gene_Variation> range = { <Min Number (0-1)> <Max Number (0-1)>
	}
	<More Genes Here>
}

ethnicity_template is a basic template that looks like a human, but you can put any ethnicity you want. It's useful when you create a race variation of some original race.

If you wonder how to find out Gene_Name and Gene_Variation, open mod\Warcraft-Guardians-of-Azeroth-2\common\ethnicities\00_ethnicities_templates.txt. That's the file of the basic human template we talked about. It has one nice feature, it has ALL genes listed. So it's possible to find out the real gene name. Usually, it has the same keywords the gene has in the Ruler Designer so it should be easy.

Need to mention that many genes have 2 gene variations: one for positive and one for negative.

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In this case, if you want the gene to be in 0-50% of the Ruler Designer's slider, pick the negative. If you want the gene to be in 50-100% of the Ruler Designer's slider, pick the positive.

Such genes may have a weird range, so you must know what you deal with. There are 2 behaviors:

1. Both positive and negative variations vary from -1 to 1. -1 means 0% of the Ruler Designer's slider. 1 means 100% of the Ruler Designer's slider. In 00_ethnicities_templates.txt these genes have @neg3_min, @pos1_min, @pos1_max, in their ranges.

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2. Both positive and negative variations vary from 0 to 1. 1 of the negative means 0% the Ruler Designer's slider. 1 of the positive means 100% the Ruler Designer's slider. 0 of both variations means 50% of the Ruler Designer's slider.