Baldur's Gate 3 mods enjoyed a new set of tools last year as part of its seventh patch, tools which it only took erstwhile modders two days to unlock.
These untapped kits allow these expeditionary tinkerers to create whole new campaigns, in the vein of Skyrim's ambitious mods.
At least, in theory. In practice, it's a little more complicated than that. Since Larian has not officially recognised or condoned these unlocked toolkits, modders have been left on their own to muddle through without proper documentation.
I talked to one of said modders, SquallyDaBeanz aka Brandon Giles, who is hard at work on two projects—restoring some «cut» content from Act 2, and remaking WoW's Forsaken starting zone. «The main challenges working on a custom campaign is the lack of certain toolkit features and documentation,» Giles explains. «The community has done an amazing job delving into all the different systems that Larian used to make their game, but even with tutorials slowly making their way to Discord and YouTube now, it's still quite a learning curve!
If you hit a roadblock, you have to hope you can figure it out yourself or someone already solved a similar issue.» I've been touring one of these Discord servers myself, and the amount of cooperation here is lovely to see—it also highlights just how complex of a machine Baldur's Gate 3 is, especially if you're trying to reverse-engineer it.