Everything You Need to Know Before Modding Your First PC Game

PC gaming is often framed as being about specs and power, but there’s so much more to gaming on PC than frame rates. Modding is an ancient PC tradition, and it’s one key pillars of the experience.

There Are Many Types of Mods

When you hear the term “mod” in the context of PC games, you’re probably thinking of the sorts of mods that get the most traction in memes and social media. For example, the infamous Skyrim mod that replaces the dragons with terrifying Thomas the Tank Engine models. The truth, however, is that mods come in every shape and form.

Any third-party modification to a game is a “mod”, and so the range of things you can do range from small, practical improvements to games all the way to the ridiculous, or complete overhauls of the title. Some mods fix bugs in games that developers have long abandoned, or have gone out of business. The excellent cult classic Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was a shambles when it was released, and its developer was not long for the world. Yet despite this being a game that came out 20 years ago, as of this writing, the latest version of the unofficial community patch was August 2023.

Some mods offer subtle improvements to game balance, others add in content that was cut from the original release. Almost literally anything you can think of that can be done to a game exists in mod form for some game out there.

Not All Mods Are Free

Mods are usually created by passionate fans who happen to have the technical skills required to make new content or modify existing games in interesting ways. However, it still takes time to do this work, and time is money. In some cases, mods are not free, and are sold by their creators. Sometimes this happens with the blessing of the original developers.

For example, the Half-Life remake Black Mesa started life as a project by volunteers, and was eventually approved for commercial sale by the original developers of Half-Life, Valve. Likewise, some publishers such as Bethesda have experimented with having official mod shops where user-made mods can be sold. With varying degrees of success.

Mixing Mods Can Be Difficult

Mods are so good, it’s hard to have just one. However, since the people working on these mods aren’t all part of one big team, it means that one mod might conflict with another. This is usually where things get complicated as the community experiments with which mods play well with others. Sometimes you’ll find mod packs that are all applied together to overhaul how a game looks and plays, with the curators carefully testing the different mods to make sure it all hangs together.

If you’re trying to run multiple mods at the same time, you may spend countless hours just getting it all to work. I spent about as much time trying to get mods loaded in the right order in Skyrim as I actually spent playing the game, and I played a lot of Skyrim.

Mods and Multiplayer Don’t Always Mix

Cheating, modding, and basically doing as you please are all good in a single-player game. As long as you’re having fun, who cares? However, as soon as we’re talking about online games, or the online component of a single-player game, be careful.

Anti-cheat systems can offer harsh penalties for any modifications to the game, even if it’s something seemingly innocuous, such as an interface mod or adding a graphical feature such as DLSS upscaling to a game. So, if you have any intention to go online, even when a mod claims it’s safe for that purpose, it’s best not to take the chance.

Mods Can Include Malware

Any software or files that you download from the internet has some non-zero chance of containing malware. As long as you have a good anti-malware solution on your computer, and you practise basic online hygiene, then for the most part you should be OK. However, it’s easy to forget that game mods can have malware hidden in them.

As reported by our friends over at Gamerant, hackers infected the popular Slay the Spire mod Downfall to spread malware to computers and then steal information like passwords from those systems.

While there’s no 100% effective way to protect yourself, other than avoiding mods entirely, it helps to make sure you only download mods from trusted sources. Dedicated mod sites such as Nexus Mods generally do a good job of making sure mods aren’t intentionally malicious. I say “intentionally” since sometimes a buggy mod might wreak just as much havoc on your computer as actual malware, but that’s what user reviews are for!

The last and most important thing I’d want you to know before getting into PC game mods, is that mods are not just anonymous pieces of software you download to spice up a game. They are made by regular people, and their development trajectory is often guided by community feedback. Nothing stops you from contributing to mods, and some games even have dedicated modding tools to make it as easy as possible for anyone to get into modding.

Whether you’re looking to enjoy mods, make mods, or just talk to other people about mods, there are numerous, vibrant groups dedicated to keeping games alive and building something new on top of what developers have put out there. It’s one of the many reasons PC gaming is awesome.