Vehicle Core

What is this?

VehicleCore is a shared framework library for custom Cyberpunk 2077 vehicle mods. It's not a standalone mod - you're here because something you installed depends on it.

It exists because the game's Crystal Coat system is a nightmare to build on top of, and every vehicle mod that tries to do visual customization from scratch ends up fighting the same engine quirks. VehicleCore handles all of that centrally: live mesh swapping, appearance overrides, a persistent save-game layer for customization choices, ownership tracking, and a clean bridge so mods like GarageCore can drive the UI and economy side.

Right now it's only used by SDH0 vehicle mods and GarageCore. Proper documentation for other modders is coming once the API stabilizes.

What it actually does

Visual customization, persistently. Players can swap body kit parts, change paint colors, adjust wheels and brakes, tint windows, and pick interior options. All choices survive saves. When a vehicle spawns, VehicleCore automatically re-applies the saved configuration on top of whatever the game loads.

Crystal Coat coexistence. The game's built-in color picker still works for vehicles that support it. VehicleCore layers on top after Crystal Coat runs, so its changes win without breaking the native system. A few specific tricks are required to make this work without the engine getting confused about who's in charge - there's a re-entry guard, deferred callbacks, and an idempotency check to break the feedback loop that LoadAppearance() creates. None of this is visible to the player; it just works.

Per-garage ownership system. Parts are purchased through GarageCore and tracked per-vehicle in the save file. The watcher knows what the player owns and what they're just previewing. Preview mode lets GarageCore apply a "try before you buy" look in real time, separate from the persistent choice. Back out without confirming and the vehicle snaps back.

Standard color palettes. Shared across all SDH0 vehicles: 69 paint finishes (standard, metallic, matte, chrome, gold, bronze, copper), 18 seat colors, 23 wheel colors, 15 brake colors, 7 window tints. Vehicle mods pull from these rather than defining their own.

Custom door and window timing. Each vehicle can specify its own open/close animation durations for hood, trunk, and windows. If a vehicle doesn't configure this, the original game behavior runs unchanged.

Localization. Ships with English, German, and Korean translations for color names. Vehicle mods supply their own display name translations through their own lang files, loaded lazily.

Why a shared core?

Before VehicleCore existed, every SDH0 vehicle mod shipped its own copy of the same Redscript logic: entity lifecycle handling, Crystal Coat interference prevention, save/load plumbing, mesh management, the works. Every car was a slightly different fork of the same code, and fixing a bug meant fixing it everywhere. That's not sustainable when the vehicle lineup grows (SDH0 has nearly 30 fully customizable vehicles that will all support Garage)!

VehicleCore pulls all of that into one place. Each vehicle mod now just describes what it has (which parts are swappable, what the color options are, what the defaults should be) and the framework handles everything else. The result is that adding a new vehicle takes a fraction of the work it used to, and improvements to the core automatically benefit every vehicle at once.

For modders looking to add their own vehicles with GarageCore support, the same applies. Instead of reverse-engineering how customization state is stored, how previews work, or how to safely swap meshes without crashing the engine, you register a config and you're done. VehicleCore handles the engine-level plumbing so you don't have to.

The collective lines of code removed from individual vehicle mods by centralizing this is in the thousands. That's thousands of lines that no longer need to be tested, maintained, or debugged per-vehicle.

Credits

A huge thank you to hgyi56, whose original Redscript and ModSettings-based SDH0 vehicle mods laid the groundwork for everything here. Their work was the proof of conc