---
description: C++ plugin and Python server coding standards
alwaysApply: true
---

# Coding Standards

For C++ plugin work:
- Prioritise stability and safety over cleverness.
- Avoid unsafe game-thread access.
- Interact with Fallout 4 runtime objects on the game thread unless clearly safe otherwise.
- Use defensive null checks for pointers, actors, cells, worldspaces, forms, and lookup results.
- Do not crash the game if a pointer, actor, cell, worldspace, or form lookup fails.
- Use throttled logging for repeated runtime events.
- Keep logs useful for debugging, but do not spam the log every frame.
- Keep networking code separated from game-world manipulation where possible.
- Preserve existing behaviour unless the requested change requires modifying it.
- Do not make large architecture rewrites unless explicitly requested.
- Prefer small, testable milestones.

For Python server work:
- Keep the server simple and readable.
- Preserve unknown JSON fields where possible so the protocol can evolve without breaking older code.
- Treat malformed packets as client input errors, not server-fatal errors.
- Do not crash the server because of one bad client message.
- Preserve backwards compatibility unless specifically requested.
- Keep `server/fake_client.py` useful for testing protocol changes.

General implementation guidance:
- Prefer clear naming over overly abstract systems.
- Add TODO comments only where they are genuinely useful.
- Do not remove useful debugging logs unless they are too spammy.
- Do not remove fallback behaviour or safe defaults.