Jagged Alliance 3 is out, bringing the tongue-in-cheek banter and insane explosions back to PC after many years in hibernation. And with it, comes legendarily difficult gameplay and tons of options for how to run your merry band of stab-happy psychos. And if you’re looking for more of a challenge or varied experience, that’s where mods come in. The game is also pretty tough, and some new players might find it easier to tweak the game to their liking. Mods in Jagged Alliance 3 allow you to add custom mercs or alter how the game is played. There are already mods designed to rebalance the gunplay, improve enemy AI and other game elements. There are even cheat mods and a level editor if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of creating custom encounters.
The variety of mods in Jagged Alliance 3 is already pretty impressive, so you may want to check them out. But that’s enough rambling, let’s get to the fun stuff.
How do I install and use mods in Jagged Alliance 3?
There are many different mods out there, but we’re going to keep it simple. Let’s say you want to increase your merc inventory space, maybe using this Merc Inventory Size mod?
The easy way to do it would be to open Steam, click the Workshop button on Jagged Alliance 3’s Steam page, then download the mod by Subscribing to it.
Once you have your mods installed. Go into the game. You will see an option called Mod Options on the menu. Select this cheat menu and select the mods you want to use.
What if I don’t have the game on Steam, can I still get mods?
Yes, actually, you can. You’re going to use a special free tool called SteamCMD to do just that. SteamCMD is a command-line version of the Steam client which works with games that use SteamPipe. This enables you to install and update compatible games through the command line. Download the tool from Valve here. Extract the files to a folder where you can find them easily, then you’re ready to begin.
When you first run SteamCMD, you will be presented with a screen that looks like this. Type login anonymous on the command line to begin, like the screenshot below.
You need to find the AppID for the game you wish to download mods for. In the case of JA3, the AppID is 1084160. The AppID for any game can be found by going to the Steam website for your game and clicking on the Workshop tab. The AppID will be shown after /app/
Then, you need the File ID for the mod you wish to download. Click on the listing in the workshop directory and look at your browser address bar. You will see something like this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=???????
Now that you have your AppID and ID of the mod you want you need to enter a specific command followed by both the AppID and file ID. That command is workshop_download_item.
So for the mod linked above, the command example would be: workshop_download_item 1084160 3006555754
The app will download the folder into a folder within your SteamCMD directory, now it’s time to install it. The folders will be named after the file ID of the mod, put them into the relevant folder.
- For Steam, this will be: %Your Steam Drive% > Steam > steamapps > workshop > content > 1084160
- For other versions of the game: %Main OS Drive% > Users > USERNAME > AppData > Roaming > Jagged Alliance 3 > Mods
Note: For non-Steam versions, you will need to enable the OS feature to show hidden files and folders to see the AppData folder. You will also need to create the Mods folder if you don’t have one.
