Developer Mode

Launch the game with experimental updates to our mods.

Typically, all experimental changes will be live on the test server. If you wish to test the changes before deploying them to test, you can manually set this.

Scenario

You've made changes to WesterosBlocks and wish to test these ingame.

Step 1 - Setup the distribution file for our dev launch.

Go to the userData folder.
Copy distribution.json
Paste it in the same directory and rename the copy dev_distribution.json
Open dev_distribution.json and locate the server configuration you wish to modify.
Locate the module for WesterosBlocks. It should be similar to this.

{
    "id": "com.westeroscraft:westerosblocks:3.1.0-alpha-2-138",
    "name": "WesterosBlocks",
    "type": "ForgeMod",
    "artifact": {
        "size": 17352677,
        "MD5": "b5409aa925a47f67158c8141e71f723f",
        "url": "http://mc.westeroscraft.com/WesterosCraftLauncher/prod-1.11.2/mods/WesterosBlocks.jar"
    }
}

The launcher validates each file on startup, so long as the MD5 field is present. Since we want to launch a local file, remove the MD5 hash. We can do this simply by renaming MD5. Let's rename it MD5E (why not).
We don't want to conflict with the existing version, we want to use our own. You can set this value to whatever you want, but test may be the best value.
With our changes, we have the following:

{
    "id": "com.westeroscraft:westerosblocks:test",
    "name": "WesterosBlocks",
    "type": "ForgeMod",
    "artifact": {
        "size": 17352677,
        "MD5E": "b5409aa925a47f67158c8141e71f723f",
        "url": "http://mc.westeroscraft.com/WesterosCraftLauncher/prod-1.11.2/mods/WesterosBlocks.jar"
    }
}

Save the file.

Step 2 - Manually install the modified file.

In the distribution, we've set the version of WesterosBlocks to test. As a result, we need to copy our modified file to the following directory. The final path should match the following (including the rename). If you've opted to use a different version name, modify accordingly.

.westeroscraft/common/modstore/com/westeroscraft/westerosblocks/test/westerosblocks-test.jar

Step 3 - Turn on dev mode and pull the changes.

Open the console and type the following.

DistroManager.setDevMode(true)

DistroManager.pullLocal()

Note: Dev mode is always false whenever you open the launcher.

From here, the game should launch with your modified version of the client.

Final Notes

The dev_distribution must be manually synced with the main distribution.json. If you let the file sit for weeks without syncing, you may end up downloading outdated versions of other files.
If you wish to make changes to optional mods, you do not need to setup a developer environment. All you need to do is disable the mod in the settings, and place your modified version in the mods folder.