I get that a lot of people’s Baldur’s Gate 3 experiences were different from mine, but one thing that surprised me? How many swear the game’s mod scene was essential to their experience. The big changes like new spells or classes always felt out of place in this RPG system I’d grown to love so much, while the small quality of life tweaks that really appealed to me always seemed like too much of a bother to get working. Now that the in-game mod browser makes installing them a no-hassle, one click process, I get it. BG3 modding, I apologize, I wasn’t really familiar with your game.

Compared to the general population of PC gamers, I definitely fall on the more “preserve the original vision” end of the scale⁠—at least ever since some combination of weird custom elves and script extender shenanigans left me with a permanently haunted Elder Scrolls Oblivion install in 2008. Total conversion projects or cut content restoration notwithstanding, I usually only go for fan patches and small tweaks or additions.

There are a few of those that really spoke to me for Baldur’s Gate 3⁠—custom dice or shields remaining visible even when sheathed spring to mind⁠—but they were just too much of a hassle to be worth it. Usually I swear by the yeoman, DIY ethos of PC gaming: I’d rather install a thousand fan patches and figure out how to emulate a sound card from the ’90s than bother with a another extraneous, publisher-exclusive launcher asking for my email, but the effort to reward ratio with Baldur’s Gate 3 really screwed things up for me.

You needed a scaffolding of dependent mods to do anything⁠: LaughingLeader’s mod manager, Norbyte’s mod fixer, and djmr’s ImprovedUI just to get started. Before Patch 7’s introduction of official support, BG3’s big updates had a strong chance of completely borking your mods until the authors could respond, and if the project you were interested in was no longer being updated, you were out of luck. Maybe this level of effort was worth it if you swore by a homebrew class or Celes’ expanded 5E Spells, but just to see my guy’s shield on his back when he was walking around? Fuhgeddaboudit.

But I felt my frigid heart thaw looking through Larian’s in-game browser. One click to install, and your mods just work, while the community really seems to have taken to the platform as a companion to the pre-existing Nexus. It’s easy to feel things out and experiment with different mods, finding a setup that works, and uninstalling a mod is similarly low-effort⁠—though the usual caveats about conflicting projects and borking your own save apply. I haven’t tried to see what happens if you start a save with a modded race or class and then uninstall it.

For my own game, author Maximuuus’ Patch 7 implementation of visible shields was what won me over, but I also find myself eyeing Darkcharl’s Containers Extended, which expands the base game’s system of auto-sorting inventory containers for camp supplies and alchemy ingredients to every item type. It’s worth browsing a bit to see if something strikes your fancy⁠—sorting by downloads and likes is helpful in addition to checking out the trending projects. Even if you don’t want to play as some kind of funky Genasi Hexblade birthed by an out of print supplemental 5E sourcebook from 2017, there’s probably already something in the browser for you.

There’s only one sour note: Achievements. My precious ‘cheevos. This might be more of a Steam problem than a Larian one, and it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I was still slightly frustrated to see that Steam achievements are disabled if you install anything from the official mod manager. The old cheater’s refuge of the Achievement Enabler on the Nexus no longer seems to work, and also required all that faff and fiddling I want to avoid anyway. While not critical to my enjoyment, it still feels like a feature of the game is getting disabled by another feature of the game, and it seems like my first Honour mode clear (fingers crossed) won’t come with a little ding and something telling me I’m special on my Steam profile. At least I’ll still get my golden dice, and I’ll always know I got through without shutting down my PC when I was about to die.