Creative Assembly has announced that the mod tools and Steam Workshop support for Total War: Three Kingdoms are finally released and open for use by all. PC gamers will want to keep an eye on said workshop to see what crazy ideas people can come up with, because these tools are actually quite flexible in terms of what they can do.
According to the developers, modders will be able to modify a wide array of assets and the associated properties of those assets in-game. Modders will even be able to introduce custom models and animations for said new models. The tools also feature full Lua scripting for making changes to existing game events, UI elements and other data.
Here’s the list of stuff modders can now tinker with in the game:
- Startpos
- CEOs (Campaign Effect Objects – character traits and ancillaries)
- Database tables
- Variant mesh definitions
- Battle maps
- Lua scripts
- New character portraits
- Custom models and animations
The one downside is that the Assembly Kit for Total War: Three Kingdoms will not provide full modding support. There’s a bunch of statics assets and game environments which the modding tool can’t manipulate. Here’s the full list of all the things these official modding tools will not allow direct access to:
- Campaign battle maps
- Campaign map hexes (i.e. the logical campaign map)
- Audio files
- Game code
- Creation of battle assets, such as:
- Prefabs
- Audio files
- Composite scenes
- VFX
And despite these limitations, modders are a rather creative and ambitious bunch. Total War: Three Kingdoms mods will likely be very complex and much more polished than they would be without this level of official support. And with both an integrated mod launcher and Steam Workshop support, the process of distributing and testing mods will be very streamlined. I foresee this game heading down the path of extreme modding and overhauls very soon.
