After launching on PC in early September, Baldur’s Gate 3’s long-awaited Patch 7 is now available on consoles, bringing dynamic splitscreen, new endings for evil-aligned characters and more. But most importantly, the patch’s arrival means that console players can now take advantage of developer Larian’s official mod manager, enabling everyone to tweak the Forgotten Realms to their heart’s content.
To celebrate the modded chaos about to engulf Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian released another delightful animated short showing just how wild things can get if you choose to mod the hell out of your game.
Modding has long been one of the greatest benefits of playing video games on PC. While console players have traditionally been stuck with the vanilla version of their favorite games, PC players are free to adjust the difficulty, add entirely new features, or, for some reason, add Thomas the Tank Engine to everything. Mods are available for nearly every major PC game, but console games only get the same deal if developers go to the trouble of adding official mod support.
And that’s exactly what Larian has now done. Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently sitting at nearly 10,000 entries on NexusMods, the most popular site for downloading mods on PC, but it will feature a significantly smaller number on consoles. Through its new mod manager, Larian is currently offering a nice curated selection of 69 mods, and it’s set to offer more once it’s able to test them first. So while the more esoteric mods may not be making their way to the console versions of Baldur’s Gate 3, you’ll still have plenty of options to play the game a whole new way.
Even without the seemingly infinite choice offered on PC, picking which mods to use in your playthrough can be a daunting task. Take it from me, someone who’s probably spent more time downloading mods for games like Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 than actually playing them at this point. To start you on your modding journey, Larian helpfully shared a list of some of its favorite mods, ranging from extremely helpful to incredibly silly. They can all be downloaded through the mod manager on consoles and PC.
For pure utility, you can’t beat ImprovedUI and Better Inventory UI. When used together, these mods give you more options on the character creation screen and make it easier to sort through your overstuffed bags by adding new icons and colored highlights.
If you want a little more bang for your buck, plenty of mods can fundamentally change gameplay in ways big and small. Weightless Gold lets you carry more by removing the weight from the coins you’re carrying around, which can really add up. UnlockLevelCurve raises the character level limit from 12 to 20, so you can keep progressing beyond what the base game allows. Adjustable Party Limit lets you bring up to 15 party members with you, useful if you just want to steamroll combat encounters or throw a festive parade. These mods, especially the last one, might be best saved for a second playthrough, since they can make things considerably easier.
The biggest category for mods of almost any game is cosmetic changes, and Larian has a few favorites to get you started on your fantasy fashion journey. FaerunColors adds more than 80 dyes that allow you to create custom colored gear. For a more vanilla option, All Camp Clothes and Dyes adds every set of camp and origin clothes, all shoes and underwear, and all dyes in the base game to a set of chests in camp, without adding anything new. Leicarna’s Piercings: Crystals adds new earring options to the character creator, while Kay’s Hair Extensions includes modular hair pieces so you can create a custom hairdo. Faces of Faerun adds tons of new heads and faces so you have far more visual options without having to spend hours adjusting sliders yourself. You can even customize your dice, using a set of options crafted by modder elliegreenart. Larian recommends the glow-in-the-dark Underdark Dice, but there are plenty more options out there, too.
Then there are the truly wild mods, the ones that add entirely new content to the game, from races to classes to — underwear. Kuo-Toa Playable Race lets you get a little fishy, letting you play as a member of the amphibious Kuo-Toa race. Mystic Class pulls from Dungeons & Dragons’ Unearthed Arcana supplements to make the Mystic, a class that uses psychic and elemental spells, playable. Finally, we have Underwear of Rituals, which surprisingly does just what it sounds like. This mod adds a set of underwear that give you a host of ritual spells, letting you speak to animals or read minds, presumably to find out how they think you look in your skivvies.
