I believe this is doable yet people stopped caring about it (I think)
This is from basics modding beginner’s guide
Blockquote
[Deprecated]Hard Mods
Hard mods are mods that do not need to be started explicitelly; They are created by modifying the main game’s database and / or resource files so that the changes will always apply without having to start a mod. Now this has different up and down sides and is also sort of deprecated:
Pros:
- Pretty much the only mod type that let’s you change the main game’s menu background
- Does not need to be explicitelly started through the custom game menu
- Allows playing mods with main game characters
Cons:
- You will not be able to play with players online anymore unless the persons you want to play with use the same modified game version
- Usually very big filesize up to nearly a gb or more except for one certain exception
- Deprecated as this is not really needed anymore unless you want to make a total conversion of Grim Dawn: This type of mod used to be required a while back as there were certain database files that the game won’t read changes from unless they get written into the main game’s files directly. This has been patched since and therefore is no reason anymore to use hard mods.
In general, usual mods are recommended over hard mods whereever possible as hard mods are a real pain for both modder and user as building such mods takes extremely long and you’ll get to build your mod very often as for users it’s a pain to download that big files over and over again whenever you release a new update of your mod.
However there is, as with most things in modding, an exception: If you simply want to modify resource files without a database then there are two more types of “hard mods” that you can take advantage of. I’ll explain only one of them as the second one will required a lot of files, too and therefore is rather even worse than the type of hard mod explained above but more on that topic in the practical part later.