First gotta say that I’m not that experienced in GD modding in particular. What I’m looking for is to play Crucible with some small personal tweaks to character.
My problem is:
I open Asset Manager /Database/ “my mod” > records > creatures > pc.
Make changes I need in some .dbr files and save. When I load game, I can choose Custom Map and play campaign normally with needed tweaks, but I cannot choose any of my characters on this mod to be playable in Crucible, no modded custom map or anything.
Is there way to do this? And if yes, what should I tweak so I can play Crucible with my modded characters?
P.S. Are there any intros/movies/scenes I may miss with Ashes of Malmouth if I play on Custom Map with mods?
It’s possible, it’s just not generally a welcome topic because you need to modify and rebuild the Crucible itself, which is kind of on the boundary of ‘fair use’. The Crucible is considered its own mod (and can be found in your mods folder). You’ll need to extract its contents, merge them with your modifications, and then rebuild the whole thing as the Crucible ‘mod’.
I am sure you know all this and the examples I provide are nothing new to you, but just to make it clear to people just starting on this:
As long as the files are useless without paying the original devs, it is only a fair use issue in the sense the modding in general is.
When someone is making a mod, they use the assets provided by Crate, and they modify those assets, change something(which may range from creating a volume of content to making small changes, and even just excluding or removing a piece of game content they might not like), and share them back.
When they release these files, these files are useless without the game.
In the same sense, the crucible no different than the main game. both are created by crate, both are modified by others in similar ways, and both will require the paid content they belong to(main game and the dlc).
Like if I unpack the crucible and make modifications, and distribute the resulting changed files, it won’t work if someone tries to install it without having bought the dlc. I think the dlc is more than the “mods/survivalmode/” folder, in the same way the main game is more than the database.arz and the .arc files.
Furthermore, sharing is possible without harming the devs and creating illegal copies. There are a few “games” that are rebuilt by fans which work in the opposite way, they provide the binaries and you have to provide the assets which you can only get by buying the original game, https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH and https://openrct2.org are relatively popular. The end result is the main game sells more and it works in favor of all sides involved.
Hmm, I see, so that’s gonna be a hassle. I have no problem with unpacking main game files, but unpacking and rebuilding Crucible looks a bit problematic to me.
Now I wonder, what other options do I have? I mean some people must play or be able to play Crucible with custom Mastery mods, right? Can I port my characters with Defiler maybe (never tried that tho)? May it break something?..
I think the method there has been patched since? my memory is fuzzy. someone else needs to chime in.
also in general, how mods work in this game is essentially the same way anything else works. like, a mastery mod isnt a seperate file that the game looks up to load some assets. its just the main game in its entirety, and then someone added his own masteries on top of that. so its no surprise you cant load 2 masteries or mods at once. from that, knowing that crucible itself is a mod, we cant have custom masteries in the same way we cant have multiple mastery mods. crucible is actually a bit different in the sense it doesn’t include the main game files but still uses them, so like all generalizations this is wrong. you get the idea tho, its just simpler to think this way
of course people have made multiple mastery mods by merging them in various ways, which is a lot of work. so in the same way it should be possible, its just not going to be easy.
like, consider this. grimmalion is one of the most popular mods here. its crucible port doesn’t even have a page of replies. If I am making a mod and I want to spend x amount of time on it, I can spend half of that time for something that would be useful for only the people who both like my mod, and play the crucible frequently. I will also double the time it requires to update and maintain the mod. that time could be used to improve the main mod instead.
Do you want your mod to be much better or do you want it to be also used in crucible? I imagine this is why most people don’t bother.
Looks like it’s too much trouble for me to even trying tinkering with Crucible modding for now, but thanks to everyone for input.
Anyway, have more than enough stuff to play around with AoM, and all my tweaks work perfectly well with this expansion, which I’m very glad about.
Considering latest Crate’s announcement of future updates, info about new content additions to Crucible caught my attention. I really-really hope they’ll do something to let us mod Crucible in the same way we can mod main game world. I’m sure there are enough people who enjoy playing with custom made stuff, and it’s weird to have mod support and restriction of it in specific type of content…
