I’ve seen a few posts on making mods, but quite a few players still seem unaware of how to install them outside of using Aslain’s excellent mod installer. Like in World of Tanks, World of Warships features a mod folder for you to place modded game files without needing to replace the actual game files.
If you’ve downloaded a mod (or made one of your own), use these steps to figure out where to put the modded files and have them work, without replacing the original (and risk losing files or breaking something somewhere).
Let’s take a typical example; that of a KanColle skin or one of Tanz’s skins, for a single ship. We’re assuming use of Windows as the OS, and the ship in question is an IJN cruiser.
1. Download the file to a folder you know the location of (default on Windows would usually be User/Downloads). The skin file will usually end in .zip or .rar
2. Use a program like Winrar or 7zip to unzip the file (if you don’t have either, download one of them and review how to use them), preferably into the same folder. Depending on how the file was set, it may or may not have the proper file paths (for the record, most of the skins do NOT have the proper filepath, whether it’s Tanz’s or the anime ones).
3. Now comes the fun and part. Navigate to your World_of_Warships folder (default is C:/Games). You should have a res and res_mods folder. You will be jumping between these two folders often, as you will need to follow their folder structure directly.
4. Go back to your World_of_Warships folder and look for the paths.xml file. Make a copy for emergency, then RIGHT-CLICK the original and “Open with..” Notepad. You need to edit it so that it looks like:
<root>
—-<Paths>
——–<Path>res_mods/0.4.0.4</Path>
——–<Path>res</Path>
—-</Paths>
</root>
Save it and close it.
5. Once complete, it’s time to start setting up your res_mods folder. In your res_mods folder, it’s probably blank. Time to start creating the folder structure. You will need to create the folder 0.4.0.4 if it’s not already there. Then inside that folder, create another folder called content. Then inside that one, create a folder called gameplay. So you should have at this point: res_mods/0.4.0.4/content/gameplay
6. Now inside the gameplay folder, create a folder named for the faction that the ship skin is supposed to be for. So if it’s a skin for a Japanese ship, you will create a folder named japan (Russia is russia, Germany is germany, United Kingdom is uk, and America is usa). So now, you folder address should be: res_mods/0.4.0.4/content/gameplay/japan
7. Now you have to create the folders that the skin mod goes to. In most cases, it’s only a ship skin. But in other cases (like some of Tanz’s skins) it’s more. We will go with the assumption it’s just an anime ship skin for a cruiser for now. Inside the faction folder (in this example, /japan), create a folder called ship. And inside that folder, create a folder called cruiser. Inside that folder, create a folder called textures. So now your folder address should be: res_mods/0.4.0.4/content/gameplay/japan/ship/cruiser/textures
8. Now go to the folder you downloaded and unzipped the skin mod to and copy the Hull.dds and Deck_House.dds files over to the textures folder. If that’s all that was in the mod, that’s it. If not, and there’s gun textures, it’s time to create that folder as well.
9. If the skin mod has gun or weapon textures, go to the faction folder (in this example /japan), and create a folder named gun. Then inside that folder, create 2 folders, one named main, and another named secondary. Then inside BOTH folders, a folder named textures. So it would be /japan/gun/main/textures and /japan/gun/secondary/textures. Here’s where you’ll need to compare the gun skin files with the base versions in the res files. Some mods don’t list whether the guns need to be main or secondary, so you will have to navigate to the res folder and follow it down to the main or secondary folder. So navigate to: res/content/gameplay/japan/gun/main/textures and res/content/gameplay/japan/gun/secondary/textures and look at which .dds file share the same name as the one in the mod.
10. Now go all the way back to your main and secondary folders in the res_mods folder tree, and copy the gun skin .dds file into either the main or secondary texture folder, whichever one it matches in the original res folder.
11. If the mod also has other things like rangefinders and aircraft (notably Tanz’s skins), you will have to create the relevant folders in the res_mods faction folder as well (such as /japan/catapult/textures, or /japan/finder/textures, etc). One thing to note is that if it’s a .dds file, it’s likely going to be in a textures folder. Exceptions include flag skins.
By installing the mods in the res_mods folder rather than replacing files in the game folder, this should help reduce the risk of losing important files, or accidentally breaking your game somewhere.
(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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