ThingRenderer

Vanilla game class at Assets.Scripts.Objects.ThingRenderer. Wrapper around a Unity Renderer that unifies material access across two drawing paths (MeshRenderer and DrawData, used for batched / instanced geometry). Each Thing carries a List<ThingRenderer> in its Renderers field; mod code that needs to read or mutate the rendered material for a Thing goes through this wrapper.

Containing collection

Thing.Renderers at decompile Thing.cs line 534:

public List<ThingRenderer> Renderers = new List<ThingRenderer>();

Populated during Thing initialization from the prefab's renderers. May be empty for Things with no visible geometry. Mod code must guard with thing.Renderers.Count > 0 before indexing.

Material accessors

ThingRenderer exposes three accessors for the underlying material(s):

Accessor	Line	Returns	Notes
Materials { get; }	ThingRenderer.cs:130	Material[]	Clones on the DrawData path, returns the shared-material array on the MeshRenderer path. Use when the intent is "read or mutate per-instance".
sharedMaterials { get; }	ThingRenderer.cs:160	Material[]	Always returns the shared-material array (or a clone on DrawData). Can be null if the parent was destroyed.
GetMaterial()	ThingRenderer.cs:247	Material	Convenience getter returning _drawData.materials[0]. DrawData-specific.

Callers that want to read the current emission color or shader name use Materials[0] (or sharedMaterials[0]) and then call Unity's Material.GetColor("_EmissionColor"), .shader.name, .IsKeywordEnabled("_EMISSION"), etc.

The underlying UnityRenderer field (ThingRenderer.cs:17) is private; the three accessors above are the supported entry points.

Null safety

Materials and sharedMaterials can return null on the DrawData path if the parent Thing has been destroyed (ThingRenderer.cs:168-169). Guard:

if (thing.Renderers.Count > 0)
{
    var mat = thing.Renderers[0].Materials[0];
    if (mat != null) { ... }
}

Related vanilla usage

Thing.SetCustomColor(int index, bool emissive = false) iterates every entry in Renderers to write the _EmissionColor / DiffuseIndexPropertyID / SmoothnessIndexPropertyID shader properties. See ./ColorSwatch.md "Normal vs Emissive selection" for the full body. Mods that need to inspect the shader state post-SetCustomColor read the renderer list and the material on each entry.

Verification history

• 2026-04-21: page created. Findings from decompile of Assembly-CSharp.dll (ThingRenderer.cs line 17 for the private UnityRenderer field, line 130 for Materials, line 160 for sharedMaterials, line 247 for GetMaterial; Thing.cs line 534 for Thing.Renderers).

Open questions

• What triggers ThingRenderer to select the DrawData path over a plain MeshRenderer? Suspected: structureRenderMode != Standard (see ./Structure.md), but unconfirmed.
• Whether repeated calls to Materials in the MeshRenderer path clone the material each time (Unity's .material accessor semantics) or whether ThingRenderer caches the clone internally. Needs a runtime probe.