Below are some architecture knowledge I have learned from modding Timberborn. It may help you to understand the game code better and make your mods more efficient.

Dependency Injection

Timberborn uses Bindito as its in-house dependency injection framework. I write about its lifetime management, scopes and some popular Multibinding like TemplateModule in Bindito.

Base Component

Timberborn uses BaseComponent as the base class for all components. Its GetComponentFast is useful to quickly get a component in a prefab.

You can also use TemplateModule to dynamically add a component to a prefab with another kind of component. See more in the DI guide on TemplateModule.

public class MyWaterSourceComponent : BaseComponent
{

    #nullable disable
    WaterSource waterSource;
    EventBus eventBus;
    #nullable enable

    public void Awake() 
    {
        waterSource = GetComponentFast<WaterSource>();
    }

    public void Inject(EventBus eventBus)
    {
        this.eventBus = eventBus;
    }

    public void Start()
    {
        // Use reference to waterSource and eventBus here
    }

}

There is also TickableComponent that is used for components that need to be updated every game tick.

public class MyWaterSourceComponent : BaseComponent
{

    #nullable disable
    WaterSource waterSource;
    #nullable enable

    public void Awake() 
    {
        waterSource = GetComponentFast<WaterSource>();
    }

    public override void Tick()
    {
        waterSource.SetSpecifiedStrength(
            waterSource.SpecifiedStrength + Time.deltaTime * 0.1f);
    }

}