Commie Doge

A Factorio mod that reskins the engineer as a comrade Shiba — ☭ for the motherland.

Full 8-direction animated waddle, a curled tail, a player-colored cap with a gold star and hammer & sickle, a green toy water pistol when armed, a gold hammer & sickle swung while mining, and projected cast shadows on every pose. The cap fill and chest take your in-game player color (shown here in red); the gold insignia always stays gold.

Armed, the comrade Shiba pulls out a green toy water pistol and aims it whichever way you face.

Features

• 8-direction animation for idle, running, and mining — and directional aim while running and gunning (an 18-direction sweep matching the vanilla row order), not just when standing still.
• A real gold hammer & sickle swung as the mining tool, and a green toy water pistol when armed.
• Cast shadows on every pose (draw_as_shadow, time-of-day tinted by the engine).
• Player-color cap + chest via a runtime-tint mask; fixed-gold star + hammer & sickle layered on top.
• Optional doge-speak toasts — the comrade narrates your factory in broken grammar ("much science. very five-year-plan. wow.") on research, rocket launches, combat, low health, mining/building, day↔night and more. Toggle it per player under Settings → Mod settings → Per player.
• Parametrically generated art — no hand-pixeled sheets (the hammer & sickle is a public-domain Wikimedia symbol; see tools/assets/).

Install

Zip (recommended): download commie-doge_0.2.0.zip, drop it — still zipped — into your Factorio mods/ directory, then launch Factorio and enable Commie Doge in the mod list. Factorio loads mods straight from the zip, so don't extract it; restart after enabling.

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/factorio/mods/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Factorio\mods\
• Linux: ~/.factorio/mods/

From source: alternatively, copy the unzipped commie-doge/ folder into mods/ instead — Factorio reads mod folders as well as zips.

It reskins the character (a data-stage overwrite, plus a tiny cosmetic runtime script for the toasts), so enable only one character skin at a time — the mod declares an incompatibility with other known character reskins so the launcher warns you. Restart Factorio after enabling; it bakes sprites into a texture atlas at startup.

Known limitations

• All armor states (including power armor) render as the same Shiba.
• Running-and-gunning aims directionally via the 18-direction sweep that matches the vanilla row order; the mirrored half of its cast shadow is best-effort (the common poses' shadows are exact).

Regenerating the art

The sprites are generated, not hand-drawn — edit tools/gen_commie_doge.py, not the PNGs:

python3 tools/gen_commie_doge.py contact   # preview contact sheets -> /tmp
python3 tools/gen_commie_doge.py build     # regenerate commie-doge/graphics/

Requires Python 3 and ImageMagick (magick). Restart Factorio to pick up new sprites (it caches them in a texture atlas at startup).

License

MIT.