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What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past?
Meta aside
We have a recurring thread to talk about video games people play here, but what about video game *mods*? This is also a trial run to gauge interest to see if this thread might make sense as another recurring thread. I suspect the subject would be more niche, so if it *does* it would probably make more sense as a monthly rather than weekly recurring thread? Something to think about.This thread is aimed toward discussing video game mods, whether that be major overhauls, more tame additions to what is otherwise still pretty much the base game, simple QoL stuff, tech demos showing off black magic the game's engine only begrudgingly accepts to let happen, mods you're making yourself, modpacks, or anything else that is related.
I'll start by throwing FTL: Faster Than Light into the ring, a seemingly unassuming roguelite by Subset Games (basically two friends with the help of some contractors) from 2012 that eventually became one of the pillars of the genre.
Optional context: FTL modding lore
Mechanically, it is actually a very simple game; the gameplay loop boils down to choosing dialogue options, managing your ship through menus, and technically real time fights though given the unlimited pause ability and reliance on predictable timers in every aspect of the combat system, it is more similar to turn-based combat in spirit. Add to that the graphics being low resolution pixel art (the game as a whole runs in 720p) from a 2D top-down view and you get a video game that looks like it should be moddable with minimal effort. And as it turns out, it was, as the game's resources could be straightforwardly extracted and repacked back into the game, revealing that pretty much everything was stored as plaintext, xml, png and ogg files. And so a modding scene was born (with the blessing of Subset Games, as they dedicated a section of the game's official forum to modding and added a page on the main website to showcase some of them).
Just adding and changing resources could already get you pretty far. The game gave the player up to 28 individual ship layouts to start a run with, which mods made customizable, the event system could be used to make up your own with just as much diversity as the base game, the UI itself could be reskinned, and interesting weapon and other equipment combinations could be figured out by playing with the same parameters used to provide the base game's weapons and coming up with sprites for them. One of the most well known mods of this type was Captain's Edition, a major overhaul mod that ostensibly stayed within the spirit of the base game while also throwing in pretty much everything and the kitchen sink resulting in a massive amount of added content to the base game. While impressive when it was released, the merciless passage of time and some frankly poor design decisions eventually caught up with it and while the mod's historical significance cannot be understated I personally wouldn't recommend it today. Because the modding scene didn't stop there. (and for that matter, neither did Captain's Edition's author, as he went on to make Hyperspace Dogfights, an excellent fast paced side-scrolling roguelite shooter)
Changing the assets was all well and good, but the game engine was pretty inflexible, so the next step was to rip it open and see how it could be manhandled to make the game do things it was never meant to do. And so was born FTL Hyperspace, the backend mod to what would become the second era of FTL modding. Its capabilities grew over time, and new features are still being worked on including a complete overhaul of the infamously brittle save system and mindblowing advancements such as colored text in events (don't laugh, that was surprisingly very difficult to figure out! It was considered 5 years ago and only now has it been made possible). As for things it can already do? More ship hangar slots, new crew types, various bugs that didn't matter to the vanilla game but was a PITA for modders fixed, custom unlocks and achievements, some other things that I'm not getting into to avoid doubling this post's character count, oh and the ability to integrate Lua scripts in mods. For a game where mods until then could only toy with an already defined xml structure to influence the game, that one was a massive breakthrough. And with this, comes the mod I want to talk about that I sunk hundreds of hours in after probably just as many in the base game, and while not developed by the same team did drive much of Hyperspace's own development as the "flagship" mod to show off its features.
By now, Subset Games consider, and have done so for several years, that their game is complete, and doesn't warrant any more updates. While there are some known bugs left, some of them are convenient exploits for the player in an otherwise brutally unforgiving game that are deliberately not being patched out and the rest are minor enough to be more interesting quirks of the engine than actual problems, and besides the lack of updates is actually a good thing for modders at this point. They have absolutely no incentive to delve into whatever spaghetti code they cooked more than a decade ago just to fix minor bugs while also pissing off their remaining dedicated playerbase in the process when they could, you know, work on a new game. They're also not interested in making a sequel to the game, as the pretty sparse but well thought out worldbuilding holds up on its own. The game they released after FTL, Into The Breach, did have some easter eggs referencing the previous game but is otherwise a separate work. You probably see where this is going: naturally, the best candidate for a mod to a game that will (probably) never see an official sequel is... a fan made one.
Introducing FTL: Multiverse, a rebirth of another ambitious major overhaul mod that didn't pan out named Project: Coalition (the remnant of the project can be found over in this thread) which leveraged the FTL Hyperspace backend developed alongside it to eventually culminate in an amount of content that utterly dwarfs any FTL mod before it in scope. Or the base game itself, for that matter. Picking where the base game left off (and extrapolating a whole lot of fanmade lore in the process), the game positions itself as the aftermath of a won run in the base game, where the player's Federation ship managed to defeat the Rebel Flagship... only for a fleeing rebel leadership and the Federation both stumbling upon multiversal drive technology, kicking off the civil war once again but this time across the entire multiverse. Each run is no longer just an artifact of the roguelite gameplay loop. Each of them represents an attempt from a Renegade, a Federation agent sent into a specific universe to defeat the local Rebellion as its interdimensional counterpart works in turn to topple the local Federation. Each win is another universe back into the Federation fold, and each loss is one that falls to the Rebellion.
With this massive increase in narrative scope comes a suitable increase in content. Multiple alternate endings, tons of new races, factions, weapon and equipment types, new game mechanics and events to experience, and of course, new player ships to unlock over the course of the game. The base game gave you 28 layouts to start with when all of them are unlocked, Multiverse bumps that number up to almost 300 (and that number is far from final). I cannot describe in any reasonable amount of words the sheer breadth of content that this mod offers on top of an already absurdly replayable game. I would highly recommend this mod to anyone who liked FTL and would like more of the same, because FTL: Multiverse delivers exactly that.
But wait, there's more! FTL: Multiverse might be the biggest Hyperspace mod, but there are other notable entries like Insurrection+, which I'd consider to be the spiritual successor to Captain's Edition, updated to the FTL modding scene's modern standards while avoiding the pitfalls of its predecessor (in fact, the original Insurrection mod from the same author which this is the direct successor of also came as a variant that aimed to rebalance Captain's Edition itself), and Arsenal+, another take on a major overhaul pseudo-modpack from the Russian community available over on VK, but as it turns out, Multiverse gathered a sufficiently large community to itself end up with its own collection of addons, available on this forum that serves as a catalogue for them. So, if Multiverse itself isn't enough for you, there is even more content available to expand it further (and some of those addons got notable enough themselves to get their own-subaddons or start providing cross-compatible content with each other)
Honorable mention to the Type D/E/F mod which is an oddity for being a mod that isn't built upon Hyperspace despite being made years after its arrival, providing a new set of 28 ships to play with replacing the original ones.
That's really cool, is it usable on Linux without Wine?
Oh neat.
The funnier part is that on a technical level, the Linux installation procedure is actually simpler than on Windows despite Hyperspace's development originally only taking Windows into account. Hyperspace needed debug symbols in the game's executable to figure out how to hook it to the game properly, and on Windows the latest version to include these debug symbols is 1.6.9 (compared to the current 1.6.14 version), requiring to downgrade the latest version by patching it (as directly distributing the downgraded executable would technically be piracy...), whereas on Linux it was discovered while investigating whether a Linux port was possible that the latest version of the binary as of writing, 1.6.13 (don't ask why the latest Linux binary has a lower version number than on Windows, I have no idea, especially since the features that 1.6.14 is supposed to add on Windows from 1.6.13 are also present on the Linux version), does include these debug symbols meaning it can be loaded directly without needing any patching. And since not much ultimately changed between 1.6.9 and 1.6.13(14?), the issue of quirks unique to either version causing bugs in one OS but not the other is fairly minor (though I know from experience that there are cases of it happening and in particular with Lua stuff)
Before that, the way to make Hyperspace work on Linux was to bruteforce it by using Wine and following the same instructions as Windows, which is also how the MacOS version handles it (though managing Wine is automated so that it can be made into a convenient installable package... Well, relatively speaking, at least)
Fun fact: I technically contributed to that particular project by "creating" the app's logo (actually just cut and pasted existing artwork made for the original Hyperspace in a square aspect ratio)
Meanwhile, the author of the application that allows you to manage mods, Slipstream, had the foresight to make it in Java, automatically making it cross-platform, so once Hyperspace itself was Linux compatible the whole mod ecosystem worked just as well on Linux as on Windows without the mod authors having to worry about cross-platform compatibility (as that is solely Hyperspace's concern).
The only mod that I've played a substantial amount is the Seamless Coop mod for Elden Ring. It's the same game, but the multiplayer is so much better. Playing with friends with the official game is such a chore. You have to craft a bunch of an item to be able to summon your friends to your world. Once you do that, there is a limited area that you and your friends can explore together. When you get to a new area, you have to re-summon your friend back to your world. Also, neither of you can ride your horse. So exploring the map becomes an absolute drag.
The Seamless Coop mode gets rid of all of that. Everyone can ride their horse. You don't need to summon your friend every new area. They use a modded item to join your world and that's it. Makes the multiplayer infinitely better. Most of my hours in Elden Ring are playing the game with this mod.
I enjoy the old-school hacking sim Uplink, but the UI overhaul mod Uplink OS is essential.
The Mental Omega project continues to breathe new life into Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge. The vanilla game is my favorite RTS and frankly it warms my heart to see it receiving so much mod love after all this time. Relatedly, CnCNet has created a thriving multiplayer community for the whole franchise of games that would otherwise be dead today.
The Ur-Quan Masters HD brings some welcome enhancements to The Ur-Quan Masters, which itself is a port of the 3DO version of Star Control 2, for modern PCs. Freeware and highly recommended whether you’ve played the original or not.
Thanks for sharing that Uplink mod! I was chatting with some people about Uplink and wanted to give it another go. (Steam says I've played it for less than an hour, and that must have been 10 years ago by now.)
You might want to check out Onlink, if it’s still playable. Massive overhaul attempt to uplink that was supposed to eventually become another game.
Forget where it stands at the moment
Played a lot of mods for tons of different games, but one that I want to shout out is this very very very simple one for my favorite game, EU4: uncovered acceptance indicator.
For those who don't know, Europa Universalis 4 is a grand strategy game where you'll usually be doing A LOT of warring with other nations trying to paint the map in your color. As such, there are a lot of negotiations and peace deals to be had. The vanilla peace negotiation screen has a big indicator on the bottom that tells you whether or not the other nation will accept your offer, which is super useful to try and get the most bang for your buck in terms of money and war goals.
The only problem with this indicator is that it is covered up when you hover over the section where you demand money from your enemies, which you pretty much always do. So this mod, as the name implies, just moves that indicator to the left of the buttons that demand money, so that the tooltip that pops up doesn't block the indicator for you to see if they will accept it or not. Simple.
If not for this mod, you have to demand a little bit more money in the peace deal, then move your mouse away from the button to see if they'd accept it, then move your mouse back and repeat until you see that they no longer accept it, then lower your gold demand a tiny bit, and then send the peace deal. With this mod, you just keep clicking up up up until they no longer accept the deal, then just back off one click and send the offer.
There's even a video of it being made. The mod hasn't been updated in years, so every time EU4 releases an update, it warns you that this mod is unsupported and might crash the game, but of course the mod is so simple that it's never been a problem for me even years after it has been abandoned. Crazy that such a small tweak has become pretty much mandatory for me in order to properly play the game, I can't imagine playing the game without it. I wonder if EU5 will have this same problem, or if Paradox will finally fix their silliest UI flaw.
Shift or Ctrl Rightclick lets you demand the maximum amount possible that the AI will accept. I forgot which it was precisely, but if you hover over the money button it'll tell you. This wasnt possible in the earlier stages of development, but that change made the mod somewhat irrelevant. It's still a nice quality of life feature, because why the hell would it block the acceptance indicator, but it's not as necessary as it was previously.
Very true. I'm not sure when they added that shift/ctrl + click feature but it must have been way after that mod had become a staple in my modlist. It's silly but I still click around a bit on the 'demand gold' buttons, even after clicking that shift/ctrl + click, just to really make sure that I'm getting everything I possibly can, even though I know it's not necessary. Force of habit I guess. And at this point I'm just so used to the indicator being to the left of it that anything else 'feels' wrong.
Randomizer mods are worth looking into for pretty much any game you enjoyed. Super Metroid, any Pokémon game, Sonic Adventure 2, Wind Waker, and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow are particularly good in my opinion. I have friends who love Kingdom Hearts, Hollow Knight, and dk64randomizer.com as well.
I've mentioned it before but check out Archipelago to take that a step further.
Adding my two cents on the subject, while FTL: Faster Than Light already relies on RNG for most of its gameplay as a roguelite is wont to do, there is actually a mod generator for randomized starting ship layouts (with guardrails in place to make sure they're all, or at least almost all, actually playable). Originally made by the Russian community but translated to English, it is available here. It supports the base game and optionally some of the more well known mods to pull equipment to generate ship layouts with, (and if using Hyperspace you get to choose how many more ships are added instead of replacing the base game's 28, up to an additional 5 sets of 30 each) though while that nominally includes the Multiverse mod I don't think it actually properly supports it anymore due to the mod having significantly changed since. The other supported mods have long since stopped development, with any still active becoming separate mods as they adopted Hyperspace's features, so they're probably safe to combine with the randomizer.
So how many are like the Engie B where the way to play it is gut the ship at the first port because repair/combat drones suck?
Yes to randomizer mods! Even for games you (read I) wouldnt expect to have them. Gran turismo 4 spec II is the one im enjoying right now. Really throws you for a loop with the reward cars, very fun.
Sonic Adventure 2 is not a game I would have expected to see a randomizer for - how interesting!
I've always wanted to try one of these, but I feel like I would have to be a near-expert at any of these games to get the most out of it.
Most if not all games have a tracker, which lines up your inventory to a map of your game's state and what checks (items, events, flags, etc) are available. e.g. you need the hammer to beat Volvagia in OoT, and the boss key, and access to the Fire Temple - so once you get them, it'll mark Volvagia as green. The first run of any rando is usually a bit rough for any game as you figure out what settings are most fun or balanced to your skill, but a tracker really helps you get used to what you need to do. I'd never actually fully beat OoT when I did a randomizer, but the tracker made it that accessible; it's especially helpful for the dozens of bomb holes, Gold Skulltulas, Song of Storms spots, cows, etc.
Sonic Adventure 2 is really straightforward and well-suited to randomization because the levels were designed with specific sets of items in mind, so you know the levels from the back half of the game will be more difficult or impossible if you're missing things like the Tails/Eggman booster. I actually just did one with a friend trying it for the first time and he was excited to do another one the week afterwards. There are also a ton of options, like leaving out the repetitive 100 ring missions, making the boss rushes necessary, dozens of Chao Garden options... Lots of stuff you can add or leave out if you do/don't like it.
It also helps that these 3D games are absolutely jank, lol. As I mentioned in the linked post, I still haven't ever actually done Ganon's Tower due to Trials Skip. It's easy stuff and you can use it to build off your knowledge if you want to bypass some parts. Randomizers will make it so they're not necessary to perform by default, but you can do them anyway if you're having trouble with anything. SA2 is a whole other set of crazy; you can cheese some of the claw/pick requirements in levels by resetting for preferable Emerald locations, and even the required Light Dash or Bounce Bracelet locations can be bypassed with some high spots, a well-aimed spin dash, or bad collision. (Of course once you learn some you can tell the randomizer to include them as part of the logic, but I'm not that brave...)
It's a bit cheaty because it's not a total conversion sort of thing, but there's a Skyrim mod list and a Fallout 4 modlist that are my go-tos when the urge for those games pops up.
The Skyrim list is Tempus Maledictum: http://www.wabbajack.org/modlist/wj-featured/tempus_maledictum
The Fallout 4 list is Magnum Opus: http://www.wabbajack.org/modlist/wj-featured/magnum_opus
Both are by the same person, and they're very well put together, aiming towards a cohesive experience with as good performance-looks balance as can be achieved
No worries about the degree of impact on gameplay, I made this thread with everything from total conversion to zero impact on actual gameplay in mind, so long as you consider it worthy of being discussed.
I'm a big fan of the Anbennar mod for Europa Universalis IV. It takes the fantasy/D&D setting and adapts it to the time period of EU4, resulting in a setting (with so, so, much lore) that has the traditional fantasy staples of magic, dragons, various fantasy races, etc, and puts it in a time period featuring the Renaissance, colonialism, religious reformation, technological advances, etc. The setting was originally conceived I believe as part of a student thesis on worldbuilding in games, but has since been pushed forward through a community-driven effort to expand the mod in adding new settings, mechanics, and entire continents. There's also projects in the works by the community to expand the setting into Crusader Kings III and Victoria 3, with time-period appropriate lore and mechanics.
My personal favorite areas to play in the EU4 version of the mod are the Serpentspine (the area previously held by a great Dwarven empire that has long since collapsed, whose tunnels, caves, and great holds are now fought over by orcs, goblins, expeditions looking for treasure and glory, and remnant kingdoms of the old dwarven kings) and Escann (the site of the once-great empire Castanor, which fell during the Greentide (when a large horde of orcs under the command of Dookanson surged into Escann from the Serpentspine). Adventuring bands sent to push back the orcs are now faced with the taller task of state-building in a region suddenly much more multiracial then before. also, religious reformation rears its head).
I've probably put more hours into EU4 playing Anbennar than I have into the base game. Every new release results in me sinking 5-10hrs back into it. The depth and the world building are fantastic.
I don’t know if you’re on the discord server, but the teasers for CK3 and Victoria 3 versions of the mod have me excited. It’ll be great to see how Anbennar will get adapted to Project Caesar as well
Wait, Victoria 2? Weren't they aiming for V3?
Whoops, I meant Victoria 3 lol
dwarf fortress
DFHack— a basic utility and collection of mods built on it that makes DF much easier to manage or do interesting things.
TES: Oblivion
Nehrim— a total conversion mod that is much better than the vanilla game. I haven’t played the Skyrim sequel.
Another Paradox game mod, like @Fal's.
The Crusader Kings 2: A Game of Thrones mod.
It has all the fun of the original game, plus a bunch of crazy Game of Thrones shit. It gets hilarious and so fun.
One game I remember was playing as the Reynes. Not only did I defeat Tywin, but, if I remember correctly, I became so powerful that I took over the Iron Throne because I ended up getting alliances with the Riverlands, the Vale, the North, and the Reach. Then you end up creating crazy marriages with the characters, creating all sorts of shenanigans.
You get all sorts of crazy shit, especially when you play during the timeline of the books.
I was aware of an active Mario Kart Wii modding scene existing, but I had no idea there was one for Mario Kart 64... which actually brings to mind another game I sank a ton of hours in that I'd deem appropriate for this thread: Sonic Robo Blast 2. This is a total conversion mod of Doom Legacy of all things, warping it into a full-fledged fanmade 3D Sonic platformer, a take on what a game following Sonic 3D Blast's art direction in a more straightforwardly 3D environment might have looked like.
...Except I lied, that's not the one that actually came to mind. While I find the concept interesting, I'm not all that into platformers. The one that did is Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, a mod of SRB2 that further morphs it into an online kart racer following similar layout principles to Mario Kart 64 (3D environments covered in 2D sprites, including the karts themselves) but keeping the 2D Sonic era aesthetics of SRB2, becoming a game with an identity of its own in the process. And, taking advantage of its legacy as technically still a Doom mod, the modding ecosystem made it extremely customizable, which the community took advantage of to a ridiculous extent. Something like Master Chief, an Among Us crewmate, a couple Touhou characters, an office chair, a Russian T-54 painted in gold, Monika from Doki Doki Literature club, a 1:1 port of Mario as he appears in MK64, Kirby and a Vic Viper racing on a Hyrule themed track or the Cathedral from The Binding of Isaac while everyone keeps pressing a horn set to various Internet memes would be a fairly mundane sight on an SRB2Kart online server, giving it a reputation as a "M.U.G.E.N Kart" of sorts. Something that the developers actually didn't like all that much as their intention was more to make an unambiguously Sonic fangame.
They eventually got their wish through a long awaited update becoming more of a separate release in the form of Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, breaking away from both SRB2 and SRB2Kart's established identity (which is probably for the best, as to be honest it is so radically different in terms of gameplay that a lot of the SRB2Kart userbase, myself included, didn't enjoy it in the way they enjoyed SRB2Kart, resulting in an effective split of the community between those who stayed on SRB2Kart 1.6 and those who followed the devs with DRRR).
While I personally don't enjoy what I saw as an overly complicated set of game mechanics tacked on what was already working just fine in SRB2Kart and a further increase of the already frenetic pace colliding into a chaotic and unfun mess, my understanding is that taking the time to fully master those mechanics results in very exciting and rewarding gameplay, and another thing it has going for it is proper singleplayer content making it more of a full game than "just" the client for an online-first kart racer like SRB2Kart is (where the only singleplayer gameplay available is time trial). While SRBKart is easy to learn, hard to master, DRRR is hard to learn, harder to master, and while I'm not part of it there's definitely an audience for this game. Which, if you've been keeping track, is technically a mod of a mod of another mod. And while the more cohesive identity of DRRR gives fewer leeway to the kind of chaos the community turned SRB2Kart into, it still leverages its Doom heritage and has its own set of community addons to mod the game some more.
The first one that came to mind is the Fallout 4 mod, "We Are The Minutemen". In my opinion, the only good and viable saviors of the Commonwealth are the Minutemen*. Their entire purpose is to build up and defend communities. Unfortunately, Preston Garvey is a little overzealous about this to the point of being obnoxious. You can't get anywhere near the guy without being hounded about saving/establishing yet another settlement. Which is fantastic from a lore stand point, but very tiresome from a gameplay stand point. A really cool character and faction basically got turned into a meme because of this.
This mod fixes this and greatly expands on the faction. Admittedly I'm just summarizing the changes on the mod page, because it's been a few years since I did my Minutemen playthrough, but:
Also, add in Rebuild The Castle to get a less destroyed-looking Castle HQ. And don't forget the recommended mods list for bother of those mods, because they just add more and more items, skins, etc. to let you really delve into the Minutemen RP.
*- I can and will have friendly, but heated arguments about this ;)
I don't even know where to begin. I strongly prefer to buy games for their ability to allow and run mods and sometimes to support projects that advertise mod support in the hope that try e devs deliver and the community follows (Dammit, Homeworld 3!!!!)
All of the below have insane mod communities and choices:
All time fave: Homeworld 1/2 with Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels
Runner up: Rimworld (Star Wars mods, various QoLs*, alternate/additional technologies. Just so damn many mods)
Project Zomboid with a hundred or so mods
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for (yuuup) Star Trek and Star Wars mods.
X4 for its amazing Star Wars mod (though Vanilla is good but better with many QoL mods)
Noita
Valheim
Cosmoteer
Blade & Sorcery (holy crap, The Outer Rim mod!!!)
Kernel Space Program
Freespace II
Space Engineers
Empyrion (I prefer the former)
Fallout 4
Skyrim (!!!!!)
*QoL: quality of life
STALKER has an incredible modding community that kept the games alive through the whole time until STALKER 2, and even nowadays many fans prefer playing mods of the original games to the sequel (at least until it's actually finished, which is going to still take some patching).
There are not really any other games with similar gameplay features and atmosphere, which I assume is what motivated fans to work on various mods for so long. Also the fact that the development team has been quite friendly and allowed fans to release standalone mods based on leaked source code that do not require the original games to play. A lot of the development is happening in Russia, but with the rise of LLMs, DeepL etc. many of the mods finally got usable translations in to english.
I think there are basically four classes of mods.
I have experienced GAMMA and the mentioned story mods and they were all some of the more memorable videogames I've ever played.
UEVR adds VR support to any game using a sufficiently recent version of the Unreal Engine. It works surprisingly well ! I don't have a PC beefy enough to test everything (for instance Jusant is a stutterfest), but for me most of the time it boils down to
There's a lot of different parameter to thinker with (where to bind the camera, how is aiming done etc.), and there's a whole website dedicated to optimized profile.
One thing I look forward to is to play Ace Combat 7 entirely in VR.
Have you found any games that are mild in terms of motion? I've tried to play Skyrim VR a few times but my brain cannot handle the movement. I mostly stick to Beat Saber.
Bloodstained Ritual of the Night gains a diorama-like quality. I'd argue that it improves (justify?) the overall art style that I find kinda meh otherwise.
I started playing a Pokémon Crystal rom hack called Fools Gold a few weeks ago. It's one that has a roster of 433 (including the 252 from Gen 2) reimagined species of Pokémon, which have been given redesigns and new typing. This doesn't include regional (Kantonian and Seviian) variants of species.
The Johto starters, Chikorita, Cyndaquil and Totodile have been reimagined as Fighting, Ice and Flying Pokémon respectively. Some of the Pokémon in the hack have also been given such drastic redesigns that they share no similarities but name with the official roster.
Also included are three regions (Kanto, Johto and Sevii), a rebalanced levelling curve and an endgame that isn't a complete and utter joke.
I've been meaning to play Fool's Gold, everyone who played it seems to love it.
Pokemon has a lot of good hacks; Emerald Rogue is an astounding piece of programming and super addicting.
My all-time favorite mod is for original Mount&Blade. It's a total conversion called Solid&Shade, developed by N0ught. If it's classic gothic literature, it's probably referenced in this mod. Greek mythology and general folklore, as well. The premise is that it's the same base setting, but much more dire. The seas are stilling, the crops are failing--the land is dying, frankly. Undead are roaming the countryside, and the source of it all is a forgotten village with a dark secret.
The fun part is you can either fight these dark forces or join them. There's not much in the way of a narrative, but there's plenty of roleplay opportunities and genuine horror expression. The graphics are quite dated by modern standards, but it doesn't detract from immersion at all IMO. I also think the game's structure makes for a genuinely haunting experience. Plus, if you're a fan of necromancy like me there are few games that let you have a genuine army of undead to unleash as you see fit.
On the polar opposite, my favorite behind-the-scenes gameplay enhancement mod I've ever played is Advanced Tactics for Dragon Age: Origins. It adds so many conditional options for the in-game tactics system (basically player-editable if/then NPC companion AI. If you're familiar with FFXII Gambits, it's a similar system) that you can set your companions up to never need human input, even on harder difficulties. I'm one of the weird ones that adores DA:O's gameplay wholesale, so a mod like this is a dream come true for me.
I'd also recommend the SSSSiyan trainer for Devil May Cry 5, as it allows you to modify so many elements of the gameplay. Combat speed, animation speed, damage values, even gravity, enemy spawns and movesets can be adjusted via options within it. It's not a true mod in that sense, but you can have an entirely different experience each session if you so choose.
Apologies, this post isn't actually contributing, it's more feedback on the topic itself so I'll put it in a folding section.
Feedback
I find this topic hard to write a reply for because I think it's not specific enough. I've played a heap of mods for a lot of games and I could go into detail talking about say Rimworld modding, or Skyrim modding etc. But I wouldn't know what to post here to be honest because it's a weird catch all of "all mods you've ever played ever".
Likewise I've looked at other replies here and found them difficult to reply to too, because commenters have replied with very specific mods for games. I might want to talk about modding the game in general, other mods, similar mods, but a top level comment which begins the conversation with a specific mod (I feel) makes that conversation hard to start.
Last thought, the topic title is very similar to the general video game one and I keep getting them mixed up in my feed. Would it be possible next time to make it a little more distinct?
Sorry if that came off negative, I actually love the idea of talking about modding, but I've opened this topic maybe 3 times this week and every time it's bothered me, so I thought I would share my thoughts incase others feel the same way.
Thanks for the feedback, anything that helps me improve any future iteration of this topic (or structure my topics better in general) is something I appreciate having. I folded the rest of my reply in kind, especially since it became a lot longer than I expected when I started writing it.
Reply to feedback
The thread "not being specific" was in part deliberate, as I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of asking a question that is too narrow for the relatively small userbase to consider having a relevant answer given the subject being relatively niche. By keeping the topic broad enough while still being centered around video game mods, I intended to leave the user the choice of picking whichever part of the topic's scope they feel they have the most insightful answer to give, with my own reply being one specific example of a path of conversation on the topic among other possibilities rather than being a more specific "template" of the kind of answers I expected.
My reasoning for this approach stems from this topic where I sort-of ran into the opposite problem. The question asked, "What's the most useful program you use on a daily basis?", while perfectly sensible, threw me into a bit of a loop while because if I answered too literally, my answer would have been "The Linux kernel" (or if I wanted to be even more pedantic, my laptop's BIOS but even I recognize that is obviously not the intended way to answer) which would have been an unhelpful answer as I don't have much to say about how I interact with the kernel, since, you know, the whole point of the kernel is to manage the hardware at the lowest level so individual programs don't have to do it themselves, let alone the user. And while plenty of my less used software would have made for what I'd believe is an interesting answer, I did want to stick to the author's wish of replying with something I used daily for a common purpose, otherwise I'd actually be straying off-topic and my answer would roll back to being unhelpful.
Sticking to software I directly interact with the most yields, in descending order:
None of these felt like a good answer to me as a top level comment, either because someone else already gave that answer (web browser through a firefox answer, kitty through a "the terminal" answer, neovim), I simply didn't have anything insightful to say beyond "I use it for the extremely common task it's designed for" (Dolphin, Gwenview, Discord, Steam, Betterbird), or meaningfully elaborating would be equivalent to giving a crash course in how to use it (kitty, neovim) which other people on the Internet have done much more competently than I would.
The answer I came up with, after briefly alluding to my conundrum above, ended up being the most common software I use where I did feel I had something insightful enough to reply as a top-level comment, as Freetube is relatively niche while still providing features that I deemed a lot of people here might be interested in for a common usecase (watching Youtube videos). But is skipping past my first eight most commonly used programs really answering the original question of the single most useful program I use daily? Strictly speaking, not really, in a similar but opposite way as answering "my desktop environment, KDE" would strictly speaking be the "most accurate" answer but in practice not be useful for the purpose of actual discussion... which is the whole point of the thread being made in the first place.
I'd like to believe I successfully followed the spirit of the kind of replies the thread author was looking for, but I can't claim in good faith I didn't stray away from the letter of the question. My intent with this thread was to avoid running into a similar issue of sticking to answering the question as it was stated not being much of an insightful contribution to the topic, but at the same time focusing on providing an insightful comment on the topic resulting in a less relevant answer to the specific question. If you deemed this topic to be difficult to reply to because it was not specific enough though, then I probably overdid it.
Was the issue that made it difficult to come up with an appropriate answer more a case of me failing to state this expectation for the thread explicitly enough, or is the intent of keeping the scope broad an issue in and of itself? If it's the former I can definitely state it more clearly the next time around, if it's the latter I'll have to find a good compromise between leaving enough variety in relevant answers and avoiding being too generic (if so, do you any insight on that regard?)
Regarding the title, I can (and actually did think about it while making the thread but didn't consider it as important as I probably should have) definitely adjust the title next time around. Or even right now, actually,
I'll look over it after sending this reply.(EDIT: scratch that, I forgot that I'm not actually able to edit thread titles, even my own, so I guess that'll have to wait for next month's iteration) The overall intent is to be a sort-of sister thread to the general video game topic, but I do agree it needs to be easily distinguishable from it.Honestly, I get it, it's not easy to organize this kinda thing and I appreciate you posting the topic.
I understand your thought process and honestly (from my point of view) I think it almost works.
Your template/example comment has FTL at the top in bold above a folding section with lore then some mods you use, which is the most inviting I'd say to contribute to and I would probably have written something in reply if I had actually played FTL with mods since before Advanced Edition came out lol.
I think the issue I really had was other comments are mostly just random mods for games, talking about the mods themselves. And I can't really throw my hat into the ring about that except maybe "oh that sounds cool!".
And I might be able to contribute with something like "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" but it feels dismissive of the top level comment unless it's openly inviting talking about other mods for the game itself.
So, to answer your question, uh... I'm not sure! I don't understand how to fix how I'm feeling about writing comments on a topic on Tildes I'm afraid but I know it's harder than I think it should be!
Sorry that's not more informative, and I'm just one person.
Right, in that case it was definitely a failure to communicate my intent for the thread, then, as "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" is exactly along the line of comments I intended this thread to receive. I guess it hierarchically makes it ambiguous to decide whether you should talk about the mods you play as a reply to another comment mentioning mods of the same game (if one exists) or make your own top level comment to talk about them, but in practice there are enough mods that are elaborate enough to provide completely unique experiences compared to the base game that it would make just as much sense IMHO to dedicate a top level comment solely to that one mod rather than following a stricter "top level comments bring up a specific game to talk about relevant mods, replies bring up other mods of that game they also play" logic.
Also, nothing prevents you from leaving multiple top level comments for each subject you wish to address (say, mods you like from completely different games) if you wish to make the discussion about each more granular :)
And while I outlined these situations among other as part of the thread's intended scope within the topic's text field, I presume it fell "out of focus" compared to the top level comment I also added to the thread and ended up being a lot more prominent than the thread's own main body while also being narrower in scope. I guess I could mitigate this next time around by reminding the reader of the overall thread's scope as part of the top level comment I leave as my personal answer right after posting the thread so people aren't misled into thinking that top level comment is the scope (especially since in this specific case my top level comment also ended up being voted right to the front of the comments list, making it even more prominent compared to the actual submission's own text. The eye-catching bold (OP) marker didn't do me any favor there.
The Longest Journey HD - An upscale for one of the greatest point'n'click adventure games ever.
Freelancer HD - Makes the classic look a little more modern.
Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition - Impeccable HD & Fix mod for the original game.
Celeste:
Slay the Spire:
The Strawberry Jam is amazing, I played the first two lobbies and some in the third. The custom music and art are really well done, its a great mod!
Do Half-Life multiplayer mods count? Back in the day, I was an unstoppable killing machine at The Specialists.
From the official site:
This is the best multiplayer game I've played, the movements and powers were incredibly satisfying: slow-mo, super jump, dive, kick, backflip, you could switch to 3rd person just to look at how cool you were (and peek at corners), and it was best played with a "pistols only" rule. You were Morpheus, diving through a roof window, shooting at Castor Troy who's escaping through the window you just destroyed with an impossibly high jump. All that in 5 seconds of glorious slow-motion, with the obligatory bullet trails.
Or you're in a dojo, weaponless, chased by a player with a katana. You do a backflip on a pillar, land behind your opponent with a roundhouse kick to make them drop the katana. You grab it mid-air, and slice them while doing a superhero landing before they even turn back. Best kill I ever did in all my gaming years.
It was in 2006, so huuuh I'm almost twice as old now. What the hell. Anyway, thanks for bringing up those great memories!
Factorio has some fun mods that greatly expand the complexity:
My favorite mod: ST: New Horizons for Stellaris. It completely transforms the game into the Star Trek universe (old trek not new trek). The gameplay isn't too different, but the whole feel of the game is changed.
If you like Civ, Stellaris, or anything of that genre - this is a super fun combo you'd likely enjoy
I recently restarted Freespace 2 using Knossos to install the Freespace Open mods from Hard Light Productions.
I used to replay FS2 every year or two back in the day as it's one of my favorite games of all time. When Freespace Open came out, which fully upgrades the game to play with modern graphics at modern resolutions, I was super-excited to try it but found it a little bit of a pain to get running--it's not too complicated, just more than I wanted to bother with for a game I've already played through over a dozen times. So I always played the vanilla version until I drifted away from the habit sometime around 2012 or so and haven't played FS2 since.
Now Knossos makes it dead simple. As long as you have a legal copy somewhere on your PC (it will find it for you, whether you have it via GOG, Steam, or disc installed) it will do everything for you at the click of a single button and you can go straight to playing. It also includes a massive mod library that you can browse, and many total conversions don't even require you to have a retail copy of FS2 as they're entirely built on the FSO engine with original assets. And it works perfectly in Linux, too.
I've never gotten to play the pew-pew with the hyper-fancy graphics and explosions on my rather large monitor, and it's as cool as I'd hoped it would be!
Freelancer was a space based action adventure game that spawned a lot of different mods. The one I played the most was called Frontier Space. It expanded the number of systems and brought in a lot of new factions and new ships. What I liked the most about the mod when I first started playing it was the the quest built into the mod. There was a purpose to your actions and exploration of the expanded universe. The mod had a multiplayer option, but I always played alone.
I lost count of the hours I spent in that mod, but I'm certain I left no corner unexplored by the time I moved on.
It's no secret that I play a lot of Minecraft, and I have a topic devoted to Minecraft mods from a few months ago.
But in the past month I've been playing through All The Mods 9 with my family and having an absolute blast. For those not familiar, The All the Mods series is a "kitchen sink" pack that crams as many mods into one instance as is possible while still making the game playable. The more recent iterations have also added a loose progression around building the ultimate "All the Mods Star", so it has a bit of an end goal if you want to play it that way.
I dunno how much it fits into this thread since I don't really have to install anything (you will have to download a metric shit-ton of stuff, though...), but I've been playing on redsun on tf2 since... 2018, technically (fairly sure it was the last server I was on before I left, and after I came back I played like 2 casual matches to check things then jumped right back in).
The servers have Gamemode Madness in their titles due to, well, changing which game you're playing every 20/30 minutes.
And by change game, I don't mean Capture the Flag to King of the Hill.
I mean Left 4 Dead into Versus Saxton Hale into SCP: Secret Laboratory into Warioware.
While there are more regular gamemodes (Stock Classic kinda, Mystery Map, Team Battles, Combat Surf), there's nearly 30 gamemodes so don't expect to play the same thing twice in one session.
This is on top of having it's own inventory system and even events.
Again, I'm not sure how much it counts, but considering that community servers are almost entirely gone (and ones with large enough API to basically do completely different things or making their own item servers are just gone) in modern games I'd say it counts.
I should probably give that a try. You're reminding me that the most fun I had on TF2 (aside from playing with some drunk couple on New Years when I was 15) was prophunt; it's such an addicting gameplay loop.
Also reminds me that the map settings modes of Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft 2 were how I played 99% of the time instead of the actual RTS gameplay. Protect Bob was my favorite there, maybe too easy to cheese once you figured out a cheat strategy but I liked that razors edge that Bob sat on running constantly two hits away from death.
I recently reinstalled one of my favourite racing games, Colin McRae: DiRT (2007). Unfortunately it suffers from the terrible, yellow, overly bloomed lighting that plagued many games at the time.
Serendipidously, a graphics mod which fixes it was released at the end of 2024, and it looks so much more natural. With a small resolution and multi core cpu tweak, it runs perfectly on my ultra-widescreen 1440p display.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/colin-mcrae-dirt-graphics-mod
I concur with others for Skyrim, Dragon Age: Origins, and Minecraft! But no one has yet mentioned World of Warcraft, or Stardew Valley, so I will...
While others did mention Starcraft, I think it's important to note its historical contribution to modding. Many of its mods (e.g.: Defense of the Ancients) were springboards for what eventually turned into new game genres (e.g.: MOBAs). In my opinion, the primary reason for this was that Blizzard concurrently released a capable, relatively user-friendly Starcraft map editor. That editor permitted easy exploration, editing, and creativity, along with the game itself assisting in distribution for those mods. Without that editor and the built-in support for sharing, I don't think that Starcraft would have lasted as long or been nearly as popular as it became. (And in support of my belief: Starcraft 2 did not include a map editor until years later. While that's not the only factor, and while SC2 was still a commercial success, it's hard to argue that it commands the zeitgeist of real-time strategy like its predecessor.)
In a similar way, World of Warcraft ("WoW") offered support for user modding that other MMOs did not. While the capabilities were much more limited than Starcraft--changing NPCs' textures was discouraged and could lead to user bans; the game wouldn't automatically share mods between users playing together--it still exposed more of the game's internals than similar products of the time. And to my point above, I believe at least part of the game's success was because its freedom of UI customization allowed audiences to change how they interacted with the game itself. While I don't recall any massive game genres being created here, WoW's modding ecosystem did create a cottage industry of modding support sites that helped users download, share, and collaborate on mods.
Finally, while Stardew Valley isn't quite in the same industry-changing leagues as the first two games, it's one that I've particularly enjoyed the mods for. After beating the game "legit", for example, it's nice to focus on the things I like (farming crops, low-stress mining) and less on the things that feel necessary but aren't fun to me (fishing mini-game, farming stone to make skull cavern staircases). Less enlightened gamers might describe them as cheats. /s
In all of these cases, and my personal experience, mods do two key things: (1) increase the longevity of enjoyable play, and (2) decrease user interface friction, whether by changing visual elements or methods of gameplay interaction. I believe that none of the games folks are talking about here--regardless of size, scale, or success--would be as successful as they were, without allowing or permitting user-initiated modifications.
I'm dating myself here, but when Capture the Flag came out for Quake 2 with the offhand grappling hook it changed my life. It was such a game changer that you could grab the flag, swing from the ceilings while being backwards and launching missiles at the people chasing you. There were CTF mods before it, but the offhand grappling hook blew my mind.
I can see a lot of great games and mods have already been mentioned so I'll go with something a little more niche.
Back in the early 00's, The Dark Mod was released for Doom 3. It was a total conversion mod that turned Doom 3 into, essentially, a Thief game, that gave users the tools to create their own levels and play those made by other people.
In the early-mid 10's the game became completely standalone so is technically no longer a mod but it's how it got its start. It's very good fun to play and there's a ton of user made levels to play through, and it's free and open source.