i have been looking at some mods who detect closeby things in a radius but i cannot figure out the exact code since it often has a lot of things piled on. i know you look through everything in the game currently and see which ones are close enough but what're the exact lines of code for that?

Something like this:

doesn't shortestdistance give a vector? what would that end up giving me a pointer to? how can i also limit it to a specific radius, like 10 pixels for example?

Sorry, edited it a bit after I posted cause I realized I forgot some stuff.
Shortest distance gives you a vector, but you can use the vector magnitudeto get you a scalar distance. To limit it to 10 pixels, you'd replace NUM_YOU_WANT with 10.