Elden Ring Modding

July 29, 2022

Shortly after the release of Elden Ring, I began to look into making mods. I always wanted to make mods for games but I knew it would be an entirely new skill set from game development. Learning to mod Elden Ring meant learning new programs with little to no documentation. Luckily modding tools have already been developed for FromSoftware’s game library so I didn’t need to start from scratch to add new content to the game. To learn how to mod I had to join community Discord servers and talk to others in the community with more experience than me. Even then, Elden Ring had just come out and even veterans were still figuring out how to handle this new game. In most cases, I had to debug the issues myself and post my findings in case anyone else had a similar issue later down the line.

The first mod I made focused on a few remodels along with edits to the public parameters of the game. To do this, I had to extract the original model files out of the game and transfer the mesh data and rig to models I extracted from Persona 5. When I was applying textures to some of the models, I came across an odd bug. Textures would map the model improperly until the model came into contact with water in the game. I worked with other modders in the Discord testing all sorts of changes until I found that a change to the model’s JSON file that handles how textures are loaded for cinematics also affected how certain models loaded textures if their first appearance in the game within a cinematic.

In the spirit of the game jams I used to frequently participate in, I attempted to make the most densely packed mod I could in 24. This also served as an announcement for a Modathon event I was hosting in an attempt to get more people interested in joining the modding community. This mod consisted of reskins, gameplay rebalances, special effects alterations, and new summons. During the process of this mod, I learned just how impactful certain changes can be on a game’s ecosystem. I managed to change the entire gameplay loop of Elden Ring just by increasing enemy stats while only increasing the player’s critical damage. I managed to turn an action RPG into a stealth game by changing just a couple of numbers.

My last mod was a Witcher 3-inspired mod for Elden Ring. The concept was to ground magic and combat in the rules of the Witcher games’ universe. The player must now always carry both a silver and steel weapon and swap between them depending on what enemies they face. Steel for humans, silver for monsters. I’m still working on a version of this mod that will serve as a complete overhaul to Elden Ring’s combat system to make that high fantasy just a little bit darker.

These mods are available for download at: https://www.nexusmods.com/users/129895713 (might not be updated for the current patch) and I also made a Youtube video for each of them to showcase some of their functionality.