• Divinity Original Sin 2 Mods
• Divinity Original Sin 2 Game Engine

Divinity: Original Sin 2 includes a brilliant GM mode, and it's great for storytellers who want a tabletop RPG experience sans the tabletop. It's plenty powerful, and pretty easy to use. If you want to, though, you can dig much deeper.

Divinity: Original Sin 2's complexity can be daunting at first, and not everything is explained in detail. The good news is that a lot of early decisions can be taken back—you'll have a chance. Divinity Original Sin 2 by Zanzer. The following cheat table by Zanzer covers a wide range of features in your Divinity Original Sin 2 game. Before using it, ensure that back up your saved game. After backing up, set your ‘is GM’ variable to 1 to activate the Game Master mode. Sep 15, 2017  Divinity: Original Sin 2. The Divinity Engine 2 is available on Steam and GOG as DLC for everyone owning the game (free of course!). We hope it will provide you with all the tools necessary to implement your awesome ideas! For more info on how to set up The Divinity Engine 2, check out this Setup Guide for both Steam and GOG.

Every copy of Original Sin 2 includes a graphical development environment which you can use to mod the main campaign—say, by adding a new weapon or spell—or to make your own original campaign, with custom levels, characters, or anything you want. You can also use the engine to make levels for GM mode, if you want more than the included templates. Essentially, everything used to make the base campaign, which we loved, is available to you for your own mods and adventures.

If you want to jump in without my help, Larian has already documented the basics on its wiki. Below, I've collected the most vital information from Larian's documents (and my experience) to help anyone get started making a mod for the main campaign, or an entirely new story.

How to set up the mod tools

Larian has put together a simple guide to getting the tools working—it's not hard, but it's understandable if you missed them while focusing on, you know, playing the game.

1. Download the game data

If you own Divinity: Original Sin 2 on Steam, you'll first need to find the game in your Steam library. Right-click it to open the Properties menu. In the DLC tab, check the box next to 'Divinity Engine 2 Data.' The game should begin updating.

2. Download and set up the tools

Once the data has downloaded, switch to the 'Tools' section of your Steam library. You should have a copy of The Divinity Engine 2. Install it and run it, and it will prompt you for a path to the game data. This is the 'Data' folder in your Divinity: Original Sin 2 installation folder, typically C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonDivinity Original Sin 2Data.

If you set this incorrectly, you will not get a warning—the engine will just crash when you try to load a level. It's no big deal, though, as you can fix the setting without causing a crash so long as it's the first thing you do in the engine.

Alternatively: Setting up the tools through GOG

If you bought Divinity: Original Sin 2 on GOG, you just need to download the tools (listed as 'Editor' under 'Game Goodies'). Extract the 'Editor' folder to Divinity: Original Sin 2's 'Data' folder. Run DivinityEngine2.exe, and set the game data path to the Data folder.

How to make a level from scratch

Unless you turned yourself into a fly and lived on the walls of Larian's office for a few months, the mod tools will likely to be a bit daunting at first—it's a system for people who already understand the inner workings of Divinity's engine. But it's actually not too hard to get started, and though documentation is a little lacking at the moment, Larian has a few guides that helped me a lot.

In the video above, you'll learn how to make a level from scratch and use it in GM mode. I suggest watching the whole thing, as it cleared a lot up for me.

How to add a skill to the campaign

Consider this a basic primer for adding a skill and skillbook, but not a comprehensive guide to everything you can or should do when making skills and items. There's a lot of data to explore to make sure your objects work with every system in Original Sin 2, but this will at least get you from launching the mod tools for the first time to testing a new skill in the game quickly.

1. Create a new Add-On

Make a new project, and choose 'Add-on' as the type. Also tell it to load data from Story, and to target Story. This will load all the levels, characters, items, and so on from the campaign, and set your mod to modify the story campaign with your changes.

2. Load a level

After creating your project, you'll be prompted to load a level. Click the 'Show Inherited Levels' button in the top right to see levels from the main campaign. I loaded Fort Joy. (You don't have to load a level to start editing skills, but you'll need one open later.)

3. Create your skill

In the upper-right hand side of the menu bar, you'll see a bunch of different icons for opening editors. We want the Stats Editor. Here, you can see (but not directly modify) all of Divinity: Original Sin 2's items and skills. You'll also see a dropdown for your mod with nothing in it. Anything you add there will be added to the game (or modify something that already exists) if your mod is active.

Under your mod's dropdown, hit the + symbol next to 'Skill Data' and select the type of skill you want to add. I chose to add a new Rain spell. This will create a big blank spreadsheet, which is a bit daunting. Since I was just creating a test skill, I opened up Divinity: Original Sin 2's Rain spreadsheet, and copied all the data from the basic Water spell into my Rain spreadsheet. I then changed the name and display name, and set it to create Lava surfaces instead of Water surfaces because I'm a bad person. Make sure you hit the save icon after you're done, and then close the Stats menu.

4. Create a new Root Template for your skillbook

Root Templates define the base version of all the items (and everything else) you see in the game. In the Root Templates window (by default it's below the level view) search for 'BOOK_SKILL' and you'll find all the skillbooks in the game. Right click on one and choose 'Create new from selected...' This will make a copy of the skillbook that you can use for your new skill.

You'll be prompted to modify your new Root Template after you create it. At the least, you need to change its name before saving it, otherwise it will conflict with the template you're copying from. Do that, and change the display name. Now scroll to the 'Item State' section and click on 'Use Action.' Hit the little '...' prompt to open a new window: this is where you'll tell your skillbook what spell to teach. Open the SkillBookID dropdown and select your new skill. If you don't see it, you may have to go back into the Stats Editor and resave it—make sure you've given it a new name, as well.

5. Put your skillbook into the world

There are lots of ways to populate the game with your new item, whether through enemy drops or as rewards in chests, but for the purposes of testing and this basic guide, I just dragged an instance of my new book onto the ground in the middle of Fort Joy. When you're done, save everything and publish your mod locally from the Project menu. In-game, select it from the mods menu and then load a save or start a new game (you could drop your item in the very first room, if you wanted to test it with a new character). As you can see above, it worked, horrifically.

Where to get help with modding

You may also want to create an Object entry for your skillbook, or change your skill's icon, or add a new effect to the game—there's a ton you can do, so this is just the first step. I'm learning as I go, mainly by referencing Larian's guides and references on the wiki, and that's where you'll want to start.

If you have questions that aren't answered there, however, check out the mod troubleshooting forum. I've found everyone to be very helpful so far, and your question may already be answered in a thread.

It’s a staple of the RPG genre that you don’t start in a position of strength – instead beginning as a lowly cowherd or vault dweller and letting the blows of adventure shape you into a deadly weapon, as if beneath the hammer in a forge.

So it was that when Baldur’s Gate came out in 1997, Larian Studios wasn’t a household name in the genre. It was an unknown Belgian developer working on an RPG doomed to cancellation – The Lady, the Mage and the Knight. Meanwhile, Bioware was making its name with an RPG that combined the high fantasy freedom of Dungeons & Dragons with the immediacy of real-time strategy.

“I was very… I wouldn’t say jealous,” Larian head Swen Vincke remembers. “But I would’ve liked doing that.”

It wasn’t only the fact that Bioware was working with the D&D license – the same that fueled the books Vincke read for inspiration. He also appreciated Baldur’s Gate for the way it put the party at the fore, rather than a solo adventurer. And then, when the sequel came out, he loved the sheer scope and variety of its world, and the choices it offered through dialogue.

“It was a cocktail of things I admired,” he says.

Divinity Original Sin 2 Mods

You could describe Divinity: Original Sin in the same way. The series that finally did make Larian a studio of renown, almost two decades later, poured Vincke’s Baldur’s Gate cocktail into a contemporary engine. Then it stirred in the granular, almost perverse level of interaction the Ultima games offered at their best. The result sold better than health potions at backwater inns.

D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast had once turned down a Larian pitch to make a Baldur’s Gate sequel. But having seen the studio honed by the slings and flaming arrows of the RPG industry, it resumed discussions with Vincke. Now Larian will self-publish Baldur’s Gate 3, something that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

“It’s a very big production,” Vincke says. “Just the sheer technology we needed wouldn’t have been available to us.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on a revamped version of the Original Sin 2 engine, so expect more of its trademark systemic combos (Divinity speedrunners regularly cart around barrels of death fog – so that they can teleport tough enemies on top of them). Larian won’t say whether combat will be turn-based or real-time, but the environment will impact the outcome of skirmishes.

“What we’re trying to do is make you feel like you’re playing tabletop [D&D] with a very competent Dungeon Master,” Vincke says. “If you play the tabletop game and you come up with something, the DM is going to say, ‘Well, lets roll for it.’”

And yet: this isn’t a Divinity game. The bleak birth of a mind flayer in Baldur’s Gate 3’s teaser trailer was designed specifically to signify a change in tone from the wilfully daft Original Sin. Baldur’s Gate was never short on silly tangents, but took its central story of a world caught up in the sibling rivalry of demigods deadly seriously.

“It’s going to be somewhat darker, more serious,” Vincke says. “But serious topics work much better if there’s a little bit of humour in there, and Dungeons and Dragons is about having fun at the tabletop. So that means there is going to be stuff that will make you smile.”

As in the original game, your adventure will start outside the grand city of Baldur’s Gate – trading hub, playground of iniquity, magnet for world-ending catastrophe – but eventually lead you into its heart. Baldur’s Gate 1 functioned almost as a sparse open world stitched together by loading screens, but the sequel sensibly cut the map count in favour of fewer, more densely-packed areas, which is the approach Larian is taking too.

“We take snapshots, because we have an adventure we’re going to go and do,” Vincke says. “We’re not going to make it one big open-world city simulation. It’s not that type of game.”

Divinity Original Sin 2 Game Engine

The Baldur’s Gate games may have been mostly dormant these past two decades, bar the Enhanced Editions and a new expansion from Beamdog. But its world, The Forgotten Realms, has kept spinning. Wizards of the Coast has advanced the timeline, bringing yet more disaster to the Sword Coast that Bioware made such a popular tabletop holiday destination.

That popularity has kept the subjects of the series safe, however. The Bhaalspawn may have violently resolved their differences by the end of the original games, but Bhaal himself, the god of murder, is still kicking about in Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus – a new tabletop adventure that precedes the events of Baldur’s Gate 3. And fan favourite characters have been practically frozen in carbonite to ensure they’re still available for adventure.

“If you look at what the Fifth Edition has done, characters like Boo and Minsc are still alive,” Vincke points out. “Bhaal and maybe a couple of other guys are still around. What’s gonna happen with that? You’re gonna discover when you play BG3.”

Who knows the average lifespan of a miniature giant space hamster, anyway?