[Sombre]

When I started modding I sat down with the mod manual and a load of sprites and just started a-typing. I didn't use anyone's mod as a base or follow any guides or ask any questions until I'd actually finished the first version. Honestly I think this worked out fine because I understood what the mod commands did individually and it gave me a good base to work from.

A nice exercise might be to try and recreate a vanilla nation (let's say EA Ermor) from scratch in a new nation slot with all new IDs for everything WITHOUT using copyspr or copystats. That would give you an excellent base to make future mods from. For this all you'd need is the sprite dump, a text editor (like notepad) and the modding manual pdf.