Editing files breaks car/car mods

This might be a really stupid question but I can't seem to edit and .jbeam files without completely breaking stuff in game. For example just increasing the idle rpm on a car from say 800 to 1000 then putting the file back in the correct folder will cause the vehicles not to spawn or show up properly in the spawn menu when I start the game back up. Is there something I'm not doing right?

 

Are you making a mod folder to put it in? If you don't want to release the mod on the repo you can make a folder under BeamNG/mods/unpacked and copy paste the vehicle's files into it. You should be able to edit it from there.

 

They did change things a bit, now you can't tamper with the zip files anymore.

You need to take out stuff in zip and put into working folder, for example I have DokuDoku project vehicle files in Documents\BeamNG.drive\vehicles\pickup at the moment, you need to replace pickup with vehicle name, probably you will have 'vehicles' folder in a zip file and stuff inside of that folder you need to put into Documents\BeamNG.drive\vehicles\

After you have done that, you can edit files in Documents\BeamNG.drive\vehicles\<yourvehiclename>

Handy part is that ingame you can then hit Ctrl-R and saved changes get applied instantly so you don't need to restart BeamNG everytime you make a change, sometimes you need to press Ctrl-R twice though.