OpenCol documentation

How Sid Meier's Colonization really works, read out of the game's own code.

Read it at https://opencol.github.io/docs/.

The site is plain Markdown in content/, rendered to static HTML by a small Node script and styled with web-ui. Every push to main rebuilds and deploys it.

What is here

Section	Status
Player guides — map generation, terrain, units, Europe, taxes, combat, Founding Fathers, difficulty	published
Shared file formats — .SAV saves and .MP maps, the same bytes in both releases	published
Windows file formats — every file of the 1995 release: NE container, SPRT, CVPC, CTAB, palettes, TEXT, FLIC, DIBs, ARCV	published
DOS file formats — MADSPACK, FAB, .SS, .PIK, .FF, palettes, text	published
Version differences — asset formats compared; rules, interface and the Macintosh release to come	started

The file format pages are the reference for the project's asset tools, win-tools, dos-tools and sav-editor, which link here rather than keeping their own copies.

Working on it

npm ci
npm run dev            # build, then serve http://localhost:8001/docs/
npm run build          # build into _site/

npm run dev:local-ui builds against ../web-ui/dist/col.min.css instead of the pinned release, for trying out a web-ui change before it is released.

Adding a page

1. Write content/<section>/<page>.md. The first # Heading becomes the page title; an all-italic paragraph straight after it becomes the lead.
2. Add <page> to that section's pages list in site.json. The list order is the order of the sidebar, the pager and the landing page.
3. Link to other pages with ordinary relative Markdown links — [Combat](combat.md#3-defence). The build turns them into site URLs.

Adding a section

Add an entry to sections in site.json with a dir, title, blurb and pages, and create content/<dir>/index.md. An entry with "soon": true is listed as "in preparation" and needs no files yet.

The build is strict

A link to a page that does not exist, or to an anchor that is not on its target page, fails the build with the file and the link. Links into other repositories must be absolute URLs.

Layout

site.json            title, sections and page order
content/             one directory per section, Markdown
theme/layout.html    the page template
theme/assets/        site.css (composition on top of col.css), site.js
scripts/build.mjs    Markdown → _site/, search index, web-ui download
WEB_UI_VERSION       the web-ui release the site is styled with

Disclaimer

Sid Meier's Colonization belongs to its rights holders, and this project is not affiliated with them.