Lua is a lightweight programming language. For those who know a bit more about programming, Lua is a high-level programming language. In Populous, both for the Multiverse Launcher and the Enhanced Edition, Lua is used to modify the game in various ways.

Mods made with Lua communicate with the game code itself and tell it to do different things, which results in a modded experience for the player.

Lua was chosen as the script for the Multiverse Launcher for three reasons:

1. It’s an embedded scripting language, but even more so, one that can be easily integrated within C/C++ projects.

2. It’s the fastest existing embeddable scripting language performance wise and has very low memory usage, LuaJIT being even faster than vanilla Lua.

3. Very popular, has been around for a very long time and has withstood the test of time. Very popular games such as World of Warcraft, Roblox, Don’t Starve use Lua as their scripting language.

For the Enhanced Edition? Probably similar reasons. Enquiries were made but no answers were given.

You are only able to use Lua code that has been predetermined by the developers of the Multiverse Launcher or the Enhanced Edition.

The developers of these versions can determine what parts of the code can be altered or communicated to by Lua. This sounds very restricting, but with some creativity it is possible to do a lot of crazy things.

There is another limitation which isn’t directly related to Lua, but it is something that you can run in to when working on mods. The performance of the game can start to suffer when the Lua code is not optimised or is extremely large. Because Populous is an old game, it was not developed with multiple processor cores in mind and only uses one of your processor’s cores, and it will eventually start to lag your computer, and frames will start to drop.

Populous’ Lua can be best learned by working with it. There is a notable scripting tutorial that is a great way to get started on modding for the Populous Enhanced Edition. The Multiverse Launcher has a slight difference in how it works with Lua, but the tutorial for the Enhanced Edition should mostly carry over to Multiverse’s Lua as well:

Lua Tutorial

Aside from the tutorial, there is a site that has all the exposed variables and functions from the game code visible which you can work with:

The Documentation Page of the Enhanced Edition

After working through the tutorial you should be well underway to start with your own mods if you use the documentation page to look up the names of things.

If you are stuck at any point of your modding journey you can always ask experienced modders for help. This can be done by asking in the Populous: Reincarnated Discord Server in the relevant channels, e.g. #modding, #scripting.