There's a lot of tools and other goodies to use in the download section.
If you find something that doesn't come with instructions or a readme file to tell you what it is, just post what it is here and someone will know what you have and maybe give some information about it.
One of the first things you will want to get is the Freelancer SDK, version 1.3 was the last one that Louva-Deus put together http://lancersreactor.org/down…index.php?file=174&sort=1
The freelancer sdk is a foundation for building mods as it has already decompressed (converted) all the ini files into text so you can read the files and modify them. The ini files are what you are going to be working with for the most part unless you get into making ships, etc..
It doesn't matter to the freelancer engine if the ini files are compressed or not, it can still read them in text format. So you don't have to do anything after modifying the ini files, they will work in text just fine.
Of coarse you will have to find out what files do what, most are fairly easy to figure out what they are and some are not.
Tip: always back up your working mod files after you test them in game to make sure that something you modified don't cause freelancer to crash. You can loose a lot of time spent making your mod only to find that freelancer crashes and you can't find the mistake that's causing it to crash. If this happens you will have to start all over again.
The Freelancer Mod Manager has information included that explains how to put your mod files together in flmod format to work with the Freelancer Mod Manager.
Basically a flmod (freelancer mod manager) file is just a zip file with an added extension of .flmod.
Example: Zip your mod files into a file name of mymod.zip
then you just add .flmod to mymod.zip so you now have mymod.zip.flmod
so now when you double click on mymod.zip.flmod the .flmod extension tells the freelancer mod manager that it's time to go to work and put the mod into the freelancer mod manager mods folder and give you the option to activate the mod.
Freelancer Miscellaneous Database, a must have tool to make it easy to identify items made by my hard to get along with friend subzero.
http://lancersreactor.org/down…index.php?file=164&sort=1
It has a wealth of information with all the marketgood and IDS numbers, name and nickname for weapons, ships, powerplants, commodities, shields, engines, and a lot more...
The database is in xls format so you need ExcelViewer.exe which you can get for free at http://www.microsoft.com/downl…3F669DBC3A&displaylang=en
With the Microsoft Office Excel Viewer you can open, view, and print Excel workbooks, even if you don't have Excel installed.