Hey there, I’m trying to get started making mods for Grim Dawn (still a complete noobie) and I’m mildly stuck atm. I have watched Ceno’s video guide on making a mod and using the asset manager, but in his video he already has all of the game’s assets available to edit and mess with in his mod. I used Elfe’s modding tutorial guide to help me get my asset manager and directories all set up in the first place, but extracting the game files into the asset manager didn’t make them available to use for my mod. I saw from some forum posts something about being able to copy and paste the main game assets into your mod, but I don’t actually see a way how. The main asset folders don’t have a copy option, only the files within them. I suppose I could remake every folder in my mod and individually paste every single file in one at a time, but that would probably take days, and I’m not even sure if it would work right. Does anyone know how to get the assets available for use within the mod? At the moment, I am just looking to make some small changes to the base classes in the game, nothing huge or new, so ideally just simple assets and tools should fit my purposes. Any help or advice would be much appreciated!
What are you trying to do? You don’t need to import all the base game assets to your mod, they are included already when you load your mod. The game will automatically load files from the base game then overwrite with GDX1 > GDX2 > your mod. If you have no intention of modding every. single. file. in GD, you have 0 reason to add these files and it’s much better if you don’t. If you do add these files, even if you don’t touch them, your mod will become unnecessarily huge for minor changes and take forever to build for every test you do.
If you are just trying to use AM to browse files but can’t see them - you didn’t setup assetmanager properly is the most likely reason. Hard to say what you did wrong, so I can just suggest to look around at existing tutorials and try again. To import files you have three options - Database Import, Browser Import, or just doing it manually via windows explorer.
Database Import, you just click database at the top, then click import. If AM is setup, it will show you the records directory where all the GD database files are located, and you can import them one by one but they will automatically go to the location they need to be. The worst option imo.
Browser Import, click on a folder from the database tab, then right click the right panel (don’t click any files if you have any, find an empty area to the right) and click import. Using this method you can browser on your own to your extracted files using the mini windows explorer browser. A decent choice, allows you freedom of where to import things (good if you know what you’re doing) but still only allows for 1 file at a time.
Windows Explorer, just using a windows explorer browser to navigate to your extracted database and rummage around for the files you want/need and copy/paste them back to your mod. Best choice.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do - there’s no reason to copy anything from the base game into your mod unless you intend to change it, and if you intend to change some stuff, you don’t need EVERYTHING. If you do need everything, you can absolutely copy/paste the files in bulk and not one by one so again, I just don’t know what to recommend because I’m not sure what you’re intentions are or what you consider to be a hurdle.
Ok, I believe I was confused? I thought that a mod changing some class skills would require me to have all the assets available in my mod. For example, I wanted to change some values on the necromancer’s drain essence skill to make it a little more powerful. My assumption was I would need the entire necromancer class assets from the base game if I was to do this, and if I wanted to make some small changes to every class, I would need to import all the base game assets for this to be possible. Is that not the case? I figured when I built the mod if I didn’t include all the main files that the game would essentially be empty and not have any masteries available in the first place. But like I said I’m really new to modding, and the Asset Manager is still a bit of a mystery to me on how everything works. So are you saying if I wanted to change how a skill worked, I would only need to create files just for that skill, and then the mod would automatically overwrite the base game skill if I load the game through the mod?
Yes, if you want to tweak Drain Essence to deal more damage or whatever, you just need the file for Drain Essence or one of it’s modifiers if you want to tweak them, or all of them. If you want to change the sounds or visuals, you’ll have to import those files as well. But for just number tweaks, you just need the skill itself or item if you wanted to adjust items.
Ok, awesome, that is a lot simpler lol. Thanks for the info. So essentially, my mod can just be the tweaked skills and nothing else. Do I need to do anything special before I build the mod to make sure the game knows what to do with them? If I have copied the skills verbatim and only changed the values (keeping all of their tags and whatnot) will the game automatically know to overwrite the original skills with them after I’ve built the mod?
Here’s a video of me making a permanent Wind Devils mod
Here’s also how to run your simple mod on top of Normal Game / Main campaign instead of playing it in Custom: Help with editing an existing mods dbr files using Asset Manager - #12 by tqFan
@tqFan Thanks for the vid! I learned several things from watching it! I managed to actually get some of the changes I wanted implemented. Though it would be more convenient to have it as part of the main game files and not from custom, I would like to keep the changes separate as a mod so that I can perhaps share it with others in the future 