Backstory

Kanie (pronounced "Cann-yee" or "Kann-yea" btw) was the very first moon that I've actually released. To this day it stays very close to my heart as probably my favorite moon that I've ever made. As of writing, it also holds the nr.1 spot as the single most downloaded standalone moon out of my entire pack.

Believe it or not but Kanie started out as a butt of a very big inside joke I have in my friend group. Basically we have this party spot to which we pretty much always default to whenever there's an occasion. At the time (summer 2024) my group played modded Lethal Company almost every single day and Lethal would often come up in the conversations during some parties, the main one going something like: "Kanie lowkey does have an LC forest layout, we should make it a thing." I was very interested in making a custom moon, as I always wanted to see how to make a mod, especially for a Unity game, which I already had some small experience on.

It was around late December when I finally got myself a better PC which would properly handle the project itself. Took me around a week to finish the moon, after asking my girlfriend to make me an icon for the moon, I managed to release the moon before the end of the year.



The first iteration of Kanie was... awful. In retrospective it was a very bad forest moon which was unbalanced, way too fucking big for its own right and it (quite obviously) had nothing to do with the weed theme. But it didn't matter for me. Neither it did for my friends. The resemblance was there, it wasn't very big but it was there. A massive concrete driveway leading towards a foresty road which ended in a gigantic house with a small pond area on the side. We had our very own moon to play on. The new few weeks we spent the entirety of our playthroughs only on that moon. It was jank, chaotic fun which I still sometimes miss we had more off.



After some time (and more moons) I decided to make some slight changes to Kanie, mostly to the visuals, including the fog color to fit the moon and added an automatic gate which at the time opened and closed automatically.



After I had made a couple of moons, and the disaster that was Terra initially, I had fallen into a very bad mental state regarding modding. A state which I made even worse by making a survey on my moons. It wasn't a good idea in retrospective for me to do, as additional critisism had made my mental even worse then it already was, enough to a point to which I didn't really want to make new moons anymore. I also grew frustrated with Kanie as I knew I could do a much better job with the level art, as well as the gameplay design on that map. And so I did (I'll be talking about the map in more detail in the next part).



The rework to Kanie was rough. I had to redo the entire terrain from scratch as I lost the original terrain data. This allowed me however to reshape the moon into a more cruiser friendly environment. Kanie was already known to be a cruiser-recommended moon but it's terrain was far from the one for an optimal drive. The reworked version not only shows the road in a much better way, the terrain is very friendly, even for beginner cruiser drivers. I also remade the entire level art, which took me around 2 weeks of manually placing every tree, bush, plant or a flower. These 2 weeks were probably one of the most braindead things I've done for modding. I genuinely couldn't tell you a thing about it if I tried. Last thing was adding the signature Cannabis, which I'll talk about later.

Design & Mechanics

Kanie is one of my very few moons without a proper gimmick to it (unless you want to call the weed thing a mechanic). What is does have however is interactablity. A lot of stuff around the moon itself is interactable, making for an engaging and more alive moon. I kinda have to shoutout Generic here, since at the time I looked up to their moons the most in terms of gameplay design and they always seem to make very interactable moons.



First of many interactables is the previously mentioned gate. After the rework, the gate has a lever that allows the gate to open, letting everything from the forest area into the landing zone, and vice-versa. You can only use the lever to open the gate, as it closes by itself after ~45 seconds. This is mainly to reduce the control that the player would have over the gate itself, but at the same time still give the player some of this control by letting them control when it is open.
If you ever find yourself on the opposite side of the gate when it is closed, don't worry. There's a hole in the fence that you can go through in case such a thing happens.

Next up is also found in the landing area, but can't be accessed easily. One of the Fire Exits is inside one of the Warehouses in the landing area and can be only found from the inside. Once you leave the interior through this Fire Exit, you can search around the Warehouse for a lever, which open the Warehouse Door, leading pretty much straight into the ship. This is to tackle one of the biggest problems this moon initially had, which was its very big size. Without a cruiser, getting back to the ship takes a long time and that is not including the weight of carried scrap you will have. This warehouse Fire Exit rewards navigating the interiors well enough to find the way out.



Last but definitely not least, is the main Point of Interest hiding east of the Main Entrance. The Botanic Greenhouse is a building I always kind of had in mind when making this moon but I wasn't very confident in my ability to make a custom model of a building before. I used ProBuilder to make the Greenhouse which did take me a couple of hours but it turned out pretty well.



By default, the Greenhouse is locked and inaccessible. It can only be opened with a special Greenhouse Key. The Greenhouse Key model-wise is just a recolor of the vanilla key and it can only be found in the moons' interior. Unlocking the Greenhouse can land you a hefty cash boost, by housing a unique Botanic Apparatus, as well as multitude of Cannabis Plants. Both Botanic Apparatus and Cannabis Plants have a special TZP-like effect upon interaction with them.

Conclusion

To this day I'm not really sure why this moon is my most "popular" out of the standalones. It could be because of multiple reasons: it was the first one, meaning it had the most time to get the attention from others, it also has had the most updates, rivaled only by the main moonpack (which in itself is kinda crazy to think about), could be because of the funny premise of it being a cannabis moon.
No matter the reason, I'm glad that it is what I'm most known for. I'm always down to add more stuff to it, even when it's not really needed. I like how goofy the main premise is, and that the moon turned out to be so interactive, I wouldn't call it my magnum opus but it is my "favorite child."