Modding offline - How?

**Darren Knorr** · May 12, 2017, 12:06 PM

Gentlemen

I live way off grid, without a internet connect, in Northern Canada and need to run TWWHammer in offline mode, with mods.

I've installed many excellent mods, and as you know the launcher needs an internet connection to activate them, via Steam.

I'm hotspotting my phone to get this to go but it is problematic with one bar of signal updates and expensive bandwidth. Further I want to start modding, and want to open up existing mods to learn from, and tinker with a few settings as I explore. Thus I want to work locally offline avoiding uploading anything to steam as I experiment.

I tried just placing a renamed mod in the data folder but the launcher cannot find them.

Thus, is what I want to do possible? and what do I need to do? Is there an issue for how Steam activates mods now?

I'm a 53old TW gamer and am having the time of my life with this game engine and want to learn to mod it as I have some programing experience.

Thanks in advance.

**Kurisu Paifuaa** · May 13, 2017, 10:39 AM

Hi Darren,

Irritating, the way it deletes content, isn't it? It serves absolutely no purpose.

Regardless, you should be able to work around this. Does it list the mods at all? If you don't have "enable out-of-date mods" checked, you can't select them, as they get naively flagged as out-of-date.

If that isn't the problem, I'd suggest trying the user script method to load them manually. I haven't needed to use it yet for Warhammer, but as I understand it's still functional.

**Darren Knorr** · May 14, 2017, 10:32 PM

Hey Kurisu

The mods disappear from the list regardless.

However how do I use the user script method to load them manually?

**Kurisu Paifuaa** · May 15, 2017, 07:14 PM

Presuming you're running Windows...

In the scripts folder, located inside your user folder (e.g. ...\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer\scripts), create a text file called user.script.txt. It's where you'll also find the preferences script. The format for each entry is simply: mod "xxx"; where xxx is the pack name. Don't forget the quotes and the semicolon, and pack names are case sensitive. Here's an example from my Shogun2 installation...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

This should also function as a way to override the default alphanumeric order which determines pack priority (in the case of conflicts). Mods at the top of the list are parsed first.

When you save the file, make sure the encoding is set to unicode (in Notepad++ it's UCS-2 LE BOM).

Edit: To use the script, you should deselect any mods visible in the launcher. The launcher normally passes mod pack names as command line arguments when loading the game, and you probably should avoid mixing these methods. Also, you MUST set your user.script.txt file to read-only, or the launcher will empty it when it starts. Found this out the hard way... keep a backup copy

.

I've not used the script method extensively, but it seems to work as in previous titles.

My bigger concern is why you aren't seeing any non-Steam packs in the mod manager... I'd want to sort that out. Are you running Steam as admin (presuming you're running Windows)?

**Kurisu Paifuaa** · May 16, 2017, 11:12 AM

Edited my previous message after experimenting a bit more. The launcher doesn't play nice with the script unless you take a few precautions.

**rayketzu** · June 19, 2017, 08:21 PM

Originally Posted by Kurisu Paifuaa

Presuming you're running Windows...

In the scripts folder, located inside your user folder (e.g. ...\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer\scripts), create a text file called user.script.txt. It's where you'll also find the preferences script. The format for each entry is simply: mod "xxx"; where xxx is the pack name. Don't forget the quotes and the semicolon, and pack names are case sensitive. Here's an example from my Shogun2 installation...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

This should also function as a way to override the default alphanumeric order which determines pack priority (in the case of conflicts). Mods at the top of the list are parsed first.

When you save the file, make sure the encoding is set to unicode (in Notepad++ it's UCS-2 LE BOM).

Edit: To use the script, you should deselect any mods visible in the launcher. The launcher normally passes mod pack names as command line arguments when loading the game, and you probably should avoid mixing these methods. Also, you MUST set your user.script.txt file to read-only, or the launcher will empty it when it starts. Found this out the hard way... keep a backup copy

.

I've not used the script method extensively, but it seems to work as in previous titles.

My bigger concern is why you aren't seeing any non-Steam packs in the mod manager... I'd want to sort that out. Are you running Steam as admin (presuming you're running Windows)?

I'll try this method man, really thanks for posting!

EDIT: works perfectly!

**vin2579** · March 02, 2019, 02:48 AM

My question is related to using modifications offline, with the "old" total war hammer II launcher it would download mods to the data folder of the game (and I would then copy/back up those for when I would be offline), however with the new launcher it doesn't appear as if the mods are downloading to my data folder and I can't seem to find the location they are downloaded to, I've checked the app data section also.

Does anyone know where downloaded mods (aka ModFromSteamWorkShop.pack type files) through the new launcher are stored?

Edit: upon further investigation the CA Launcher now uses both the \Steam\steamapps\workshop\content and \Steam\steamapps\common\Total War WARHAMMER II\data folder for mods.

Looks like mods that have been added or updated since the new CA Launcher was released are switched to use the new content folder and the .pack file will only be there by default. So modders who are looking for their files and can't find them check there because that's where they vanished to lol.