Announcing Mod Support for Total War: THREE KINGDOMS!July 4 2019
We know that modding is an important part of the Total War community, and so we’re happy to officially announce the release of the Assembly Kit and Steam Workshop support for Total War: THREE KINGDOMS.
I’m not a modder – what does this mean? This means you can expect to see a wide variety of Total War: THREE KINGDOMS mods including unit reskins, balance tweaks, new battle maps, scripted mods, new UI elements, new events, new characters, and much more.
You’ll be able to find these on the Steam Workshop, much like you would for other titles such as Total War: WARHAMMER II or Total War: ROME II. Simply find the mod you like, subscribe to it, and check it’s loaded in the launcher’s mod manager next time you launch the game.
Known Issues There are currently some unexpected issues when downloading custom battle maps through multiplayer lobbies. On occasion, acquiring a map this way can cause the game to become temporarily unresponsive, and may additionally place players in separate lobbies. There is also a crash that can occur when loading a replay after quitting a game on a map acquired through the lobby.
While we are working on a fix, we recommend you acquire maps from the Steam Workshop before attempting multiplayer battles that use them.
And for the modders? First and foremost, the modding process will largely remain the same as in previous titles.
As such, if you want to take a dive into modding THREE KINGDOMS we recommend you take a look at some of the guides out there for ROME II onwards to get you ready for release on Thursday the 4th of July.
The tools available 
The Assembly Kit makes a return with Dave (for database editing), Terry (for battle map creation), BoB (for compilation of pack files), and the Variant Editor (for editing unit model collections). We’ve also provided a number of art resources to assist in the creation of custom assets.
We listened to the modding community and have given all of these thorough testing to help with stability and provide new features to help with usability. You should also be good to edit pack files with the community made pack file manager tools.
What’s moddable? Below is a list of the moddable aspects of the game:
- Startpos
- CEOs (see below)
- Database tables
- Variant mesh definitions
- Battle maps
- Lua scripts (thanks to Vandy for his contributions here!)
- New character portraits.
- Custom models and animations
However, the following as aspects of the game are not currently moddable:
- Campaign battle maps
- Campaign map hexes (i.e. the logical campaign map)
- Audio files
- Game code
- Creation of battle assets, such as:
- Prefabs
- Audio files
- Composite scenes
- VFX
Tools upgrade We’ve worked on a few new tricks for the old tools to make modding even easier – check them out below.
BoB- Now includes an action for processing CEOs
Dave 
- Docking support tabs – with more freedom to place multiple tables
- Excel integration – including the ability to edit tables in Excel within Dave
- Table dependency graphs, showing you how tables are linked
- Pin groups, allowing you to quickly access tables around specific tasks (e.g. adding new units) and the ability to share these with other modders and integrate these into Excel
- Tables continue to be filterable, searchable, and show their schemas as well as the same other basic functions as before
- Similar preference settings to before
- The ability to display database differences, apply commands from files, save update commands, and open local changes folders are all present
- In addition to regular exporting, Dave also has a new CEO export function
- SQL queries, global search, and Tweak tools are present as before
Terry 
- More AI hint types than what was supported in WARHAMMER II
- We’ve enabled the placing of capture locations (capture zones), river splines, and composite scenes
What’s new The game is much more data driven than previous titles, so be sure to check around to see how the old systems you know have been fleshed out further – for example, there are now additional data tables for unit mods that control performance in the auto-resolver and AI evaluation.
Furthermore, character traits and ancillaries are now combined into a new system called a Campaign Effect Object (CEO). These are a subset of tables within Dave that, once complete, need to be built into an ESF file with the build CEO option in Dave.
Unfortunately, at this stage the game can only read a CEO file from one mod at a time so much like startpos mods, mods that edit CEO files will not be compatible with one another.
We’ve created resources in the Assembly_kit/artist_resources directory to allow modders to create their own 2D character artwork, split into components that reflect mood and armour. The documentation for this can be found in the same directory.
Workshop Curation At this point we’d like to remind mod authors that we will be curating the workshop and remove any mods that breach the modding terms found in the game’s EULA. Please refrain from creating mods that are designed to provoke, intimidate, or antagonise other groups, reference other IP, or create content of a sexual nature. You can read the EULA in full
here.
Steam Workshop details
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Originally Posted by Daruwind
