Civ5Mod extension

[bane_]

I'm trying to learn how to mod on my own and asking questions to more experienced people, because I found that to be the best way to learn everything in life so far.

I already download the Steam tools for the job, and already started minor tweaks here and there, but I wanted to see the core of other's mods. Recently I downloaded a bunch of Wonders from this wonderful thread (pun intended) and wanted to see how it all works, but ModBuddy doesn't edit *.civ5mod.
Notepad++ also doesn't recognize the coding, it seems, I get a bunch of weird characters like when you try to open a file with the wrong program.

Help?

 

[bane_]

Ugh, just realized the game extract them itself and then we get the good ol' .xml
Does this always happen? The extraction into lua/xml or some mods are harder to modify?

 

[Nutty]

.civ5mod is the format a mod is in when you download it from Steam before it's extracted. It's just a 7-zip file. ModBuddy creates it automatically (in the packages folder of your mod) when you build it, and that's what you upload to Steam. Some modders on CivFanatics upload .civmod files, and some zip up the mod in their mods folder and upload that; the result is much the same.