Video Games You Have Personally Modded in Some Form

What video games have you personally modded in some type or form?

Let's go for a very very broad definition of "modded" here.

For example, in 1996 I read in some gaming magazine that it was fairly easily to edit a txt file in Civ 1 to make units and building have different characteristics. So I went crazy and stared having Archers that could travel tens of spaces per ton and crush all before them.

And then around the same time I read you could do the same in Civ II and I created a super type of terrain that gave insane bonuses to it, created a map where only the continental United States had that terrain, and went on to create a very tight and compact super-empire that had a city per tile.

Not a huge mod to a game, but a modification that I personally did none the less.

How about you? Have you modded any games?

Does writing MMO Add-Ons count? Way back in the wee early days of WoW, I created BankStatement, a relatively simple addon that allowed you to view the contents of your Bank while traveling out and about in the world. It wasn't much, but it did fill a need at the time. I eventually drifted away from WoW, and with it, my inclination and ability to continue maintaining it. Other people picked up where I left off and created their own version; sometimes giving credit to me, sometimes just copying all the code, and almost always a better implementation than I had time to build.

Interestingly, Curse still has a record of BankStatement, with a delightfully low project number. Sadly, the version history and code is missing -- not that it would do much good at this point.

Me and some co-workers made a DOOM wad file of the office we worked at because everyone did that in the mid 90s. The boss' office contained a cacodemon because of course it did.

Civ IV was a great Civ game but made awful, unrealistic maps (just like every damn Civ game ever). So I made a mod that used plate tectonics to generate a more realistic map. It was just for me though, I never published it anywhere. I tried to port it to Civ V which makes egregiously bad maps but the combination of having to learn Lua for scripting (Civ IV used Python, something I know very well) and the change to hexes meant I did not finish the port.

Not really a mod but I did do a lot of work on it, was my personal Skyrim "must have" mod collection all tossed into a single mod. I fixed all the inconsistencies and texture problems and such and bundled it all up so I could re-install Skyrim and apply the mod and have a base set of "better Skyrim". Again, this was just for my personal use and convenience. I guess I am not into sharing, not that I could actually publish that mod anywhere without getting a lot of permissions. I did not keep it up and now it is all in an archive somewhere for some reason - I could probably delete all of it now, everything is so out of date.

I made a couple of pieces of ship equipment for Escape Velocity Override.

The only one I remember added a complement of "marines" to a ship. That game had a boarding mechanic where the chance of success was based on the relative crew sizes of the ships involved, so I added a module that increased crew count so smaller ships could be made better for boarding operations.

The only thing I did is make some skins for my sims on the original Sims back in '99.

In other news Jeez I'm old.

I added Nine Inch Nails music to my copy of Doom & Doom 2.

I edited the spell durations and walk speed in the smash hit PC RPG Drakensang: The Dark Eye, which I'm sure you've all played.

I changed the small fonts in EU3 to be readable on a TV.

That's more or less all I can remember, though there are probably a few small tweaks to other games here and there.

Made a few basic maps for Quake in about 97 using Worldcraft and Qbsp. That's about as deep as I ever got.

Anything else I did was using the built-in map editor of games (Age of Empires I and II, as well as Operation Flashpoint come to mind), or editing the text of save files to cheat (in Europa Universalis I and II, for example).

Not a game that I modded but a BBS software (going way back for you young'ins!).

Spoiler Alert: This is really geeky so be prepared.

There was a piece of software to run a BBS called Renegade. I was the first Renegade BBS to have arrow keys for menu navigation, as well as ANSI headers for file listings and message boards. I had a group called TRiC (The Renegade Information Crew). We would release a pack each month with graphics and how-to mods. All of the graphics on my board were made by ACiD and iCE. I had worldwide distribution for my packs. I also had TRiCNet to network the boards together (Kind of like FidoNet but on a much smaller basis).

Oh man, those were the days. I had something around 80% usage monthly on my board with users from all over the world (And this is when you had to call a local landline number to dial into a board).

I hex-edited unit files in the original Command & Conquer to give Minigunners, the basic infantry unit, lasers from the Obelisk of Light building, and let a squad of five of them run rampant through every mission I could use them in.

I modded Anachronox after a bug locked me out of the best weapon in the game for one of the characters. My mod was limited to opening the script, figuring out how it worked, changing a few variables, recompiling, and collect my sweet loot.

It was pretty satisfying.

Universal Military Simulator II had a Planet Editor expansion.

I don't think I ever actually *played* the game, I just spent ridiculous amounts of time building a new map/scenario that wound up looking a lot like the Avalon Hill Blitzkreig board game, now that I think about it.

I used to make custom missions for the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games of course.

I actually ported the first 7 battles of TIE Fighter over to X-Wing Alliance format and did a bunch of tweaks. Pretty sure my work was picked up and used in the eventual total conversion mod that was released.

I tried making some custom L4D levels back when we were all playing the heck out of that. But I never got much farther than a few rooms. Was more fun to just play.

Lots of ini or cfg text file editing through the years.

There was a great ME3 mod that let you rebind keys for multiplayer. I think the ini files were in some proprietary format so you had to extract, make changes, then recompile. But it was so worth it to get the cover and revive buttons on different keys!

I had to edit various game files to get Gabriel Knight to run on my PS/2 that only had 3mb of RAM rather than the required 4mb. That was in addition to a custom autoexec and config file. Can’t believe that worked in retrospect.

I've done text file editing for multiple games like Nexus Jupiter Incident to give myself more resources, and XCOM2 to tweak the enemy spawn numbers. In most cases these are config files meant to be edited but sometimes they are "raw" scripting files that only make sense to the developer and I have to poke around a bit to figure out what number does what.