Today, Larian Studios finally outlined a release plan for the official Baldur's Gate 3 mod tools. The Closed Alpha is actually available today, though only for a select group of mod creators from the community, which will be expanded over time.
Next month, Larian plans to allow users to register for a Closed Beta event with around 1K participants. The goal is to fully release the mod tools with Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 7 sometime in September.
As previously announced, the toolkit will enable the creation of cross-platform mods thanks to the collaboration with mod.io. Here's what modders can look forward to when it comes to the toolkit itself:
- Access the editor to create your own mods.
- Upload mods directly to mod.io servers.
- Load levels read-only to look at all the local entities, as well as the setup, and test your mods in-game while creating them.
- Get access to our internal editors for supported asset types such as textures and visual models, allowing you to override them directly in your mod through the developer interface.
- Publish your mod via the editor where it will be moderated and made visible in the in-game browser, or pack your mod locally to upload to a third-party site.
- Mod UIs through file editing. We will provide documentation that will explain how our internals are set up to solve mod loading/compatibility issues.
- Within Baldur’s Gate 3 itself, you’ll be able to:
- Download and manage your mods directly.
- Manage multiplayer and save game files through a verification UI.
An internal curation process managed by mod.io will determine which Baldur's Gate 3 mods are available on consoles. As usual with console mods, it sounds like they will be very limited - for example, there won't be any direct level editing or changes to core game elements (like story, cinematics, dialogues, quests, and local gameplay adjustments) due to 'technical constraints' and 'platform-specific guidelines'.
Do not fret, though: on PC, modding outside of the official pipeline (like what we've seen so far) remains entirely supported. These unregulated mods may still be packed locally with mod.io’s toolset and uploaded to other mod distribution platforms, according to Larian.
This means that those mods can still be downloaded manually, and Baldur's Gate 3 mod browser will still recognize them and allow you to manage them in the mod load order of the game. However, because they would be local and alter unsupported systems, there will not be embedded support for checking for updates and syncing to others in a multiplayer session.
