I'm trying to create a food making mod. I have a custom stove and I want to create different food "modules". These modules require the custom stove to work. I can get the modules working if I attach them through SimPE but how do I "connect" them to another mod if they're standalone/useless without the base mod?

I'm newish to modding and this is throwing me hard.

Thank you.

I'm not sure what you mean by "attaching" them through SimPE. How does the mod actually work, and why is it not possible to just use the existing food/cooking system that already exists in the game?

Because some of the foods don't make sense in a "normal" oven. It's a futuristic, alien-esque oven. Making food from the future doesn't make sense in a "modern" oven and some "modern" foods can't be made in the alien tech. I want to put my oven in the game and then "s'mores" would unlock if the smores module was installed. Likewise, "century eggs" would be able to be made if that module was installed. But ALL modules would require the oven, the options that show up would depend on what modules were installed. But I have no idea how to make the oven read which modules are installed, or how to make the modules tell the oven they're there.

Sounds like you just want to define a new type of stove and some new cook types. So you would create new constants for those things in the stove globals, and then modify the functions there to handle stoves and foods that have those types properly, and then just create your stove with the new stove type and your foods with the new cook types. It's basically just the same logic that causes you not to be able to cook things on the cooktop that require an oven.

The game knows that custom foods are installed because all foods come with an invisible Menu object that is instantiated on every lot and that object has a bunch of information in it about what methods can be used to cook the food and what time of day it should be available at, and so forth. The stove and the fridge then use that info to build their menus of foods that should be cookable.