Our love for PC games is matched only by our love of changing PC games. And modders have been changing PC games almost since the first moment they arrived, then uploading their modifications so others can enjoy them.
The sims 4 won't launch. I clicked play and the task manager shows TS4.exe and the mouse loads for a few seconds and after that they both disappears and nothing happen. Sims 4 not starting.
Mods can do something small: fix a bug, correct a typo in on-screen text, add a new item of clothing for your character, adjust how a weapon works, and a million other little tweaks and changes. Mods can also be massive projects, completely transforming how a game looks or functions, and can provide all new quests, adventures, and in-game systems. Mods, be they big or small, add to our the enjoyment of PC games, provide completely new ways to play them, and influence the entire landscape of the games industry.
With thousands of mods for hundreds of games, it can be hard to know where to begin. If you're new to finding, installing, and using mods for PC games, we're here to help. Here's how to get started.
Steam WorkshopThe Complete Guide to PC Gaming
PC Gamer is going back to the basics with a series of guides, how-tos, and deep dives into PC gaming's core concepts. We're calling it The Complete Guide to PC Gaming, and it's all being made possible by Razer, which stepped up to support this months-long project. Thanks, Razer!
If you've never used mods before, a great place to start is the Steam Workshop. There you'll find hundreds of Steam games that support mods, and thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands) of mods for games like CS:GO, No Man's Sky, Cities: Skylines, Portal 2, Prison Architect, Civ 5, Stellaris, and lots more.
Typically the mods in the Workshop are categorized by type, and you can use keyword searches to look for something specific. Mods are also voted on by users so you can see what's most popular and what's been downloaded the most by other players.
The best part is that installing mods in the Workshop is almost always a one-click process. Just click the subscribe button on any mod you'd like to install, and they'll be added to your game the next time you launch it. To remove a mod, you just need to click unsubscribe. Some games, such as recent Civilizations, have in-game menus where you can activate and deactivate mods you subscribe to. It's an easy way to add and remove mods from your games, and there are new mods added all the time.
Nexus Mods
The simplicity of the Steam Workshop is great, but when mods are bigger and more complex they may need more than a single click installation. The Nexus Mods site hosts both simple and complex mods for over 600 games, probably most notably for Bethesda RPGs Skyrim, Oblivion, and the Fallout series. You'll also find lots of mods for series like The Witcher, Mount & Blade, Mass Effect, XCOM, and many others.
You need to create a free account to download mods, but if you're into modding it's absolutely worth it. Nexus Mods has its own mod manager, which helps you manage the mods you download, makes installation much easier, and lets you know when there are new versions available for updating. Once installed, it'll even detect which games you own that it supports, making it easy to get started with modding them. Nexus Mods is also developing a new mod manager called Vortex which is now in beta, featuring more intuitive controls and new features, though it currently doesn't support most of the games Nexus Mods hosts files for.
Nexus Mods has a massive and highly enthusiastic community—there are over 15 million members who have collectively downloaded nearly 3 billion files. The site also publishes mod spotlight features created by the staff, and even has a rewards system for modders that can earn them a bit of money for their hard work (paid by the site, not by the users). If you want to really get into modding your games, get familiar with Nexus Mods. It's an outstanding and reliable resource of the best mods ever made.
Mod DB
Mod DB is a long-running modding community website, first established in 2002. Since then it's amassed thousands of mods and over a million downloads. There you'll find mods for games like the STALKER series, the original Doom, Half-Life, Total War, Command and Conquer, and lots more. It's an excellent resource to hunt for mods for older games that might not turn up at the Steam Workshop or Nexus Mods.
Mod DB provides a voice for modders, and there are many who post developer blogs and news about mods in progress. It's also the site of the Mod of the Year Awards, a contest that's been running for the past 17 years, where users can vote on their favorite mods.
Other mod sites
The three sites listed above should provide you with mods for just about every game you're looking for, but there are still other places to look for mods for specific games. CurseForge hosts mods and addons for MMOs like World of Warcraft. Minecraftforum.net is a great place to find Minecraft mods you might not see elsewhere. For Grand Theft Auto 5, you should look at GTA5mods.com, and GTAxScripting, and keep in mind there's quite a lot involved in getting GTA mods to work since the game doesn't technically support them. You can find some No Man's Sky mods at the Steam Workshop, but there's also a dedicated site to browse for more.
And if you're looking for a place to jump in, we cover mod news every single week here on PC Gamer, and we've got lots of articles to point you at some great mods for great games:
The best total conversion mods
The best Skyrim mods The best Skyrim Special Edition mods The best Minecraft mods The best Kerbal Space Program mods The best Divinity: Original Sin 2 mods The best XCOM 2 mods The best Fallout New Vegas mods The best Fallout 4 mods The best Ark: Survival Evolved mods The best No Man's Sky mods The best Witcher 3 mods The best Kingdom Come Deliverance mods The best Stardew Valley mods The best RimWorld mods Modding tips
While we wish modding were always a simple affair, it can often be complicated and require a bit of work on your end. Here are a few tips to keep in mind.
Back up your saved games
Using mods can have an effect on your saved games, and you may run into problems further down the line. Sometimes when a game is patched, the mod will also need a patch to be compatible with the new version of the game, and that might not happen immediately (or, in some cases, ever). That means you may start playing your game and find your modded save isn't working. Always be prepared for the fact that a modded game may stop functioning, you may lose your progress, or your save may no longer be compatible. Make a clean save of your game before you mod it, and keep it somewhere so you can restore it if you need to.
Be very careful modding online games
Modding a singleplayer game is a lot different than modding an online game. There are a lot of multiplayer games that support mods, like Team Fortress 2, Ark, Rust, and many others. Not all do, however. It's hard to predict how developers and publishers will react to mods for online games, so you are taking a risk of being banned for using mods in a multiplayer atmosphere. Be extremely careful the mod you're using isn't regarded as a cheat.
Notepad++ is useful for editing ini files
Sometimes you're required to do a little modding yourself to get a mod to work. This may require you to edit an ini or text file. Notepad++ is great for this, much better than the Notepad software in Windows.
Always read everything on the mod page
Before you download any mod, fully read what the mod author has written. Installation may require more than simply extracting a file and putting it in the right folder. Sometimes mods can conflict with one another, or need to be ordered a certain way for them to work, and these details are usually noted by the author. If there is user feedback or reviews, make sure to read them too: if you're having trouble getting the mod running, someone else may have provided a solution.
There's not a one-size-fits-all way to install and run different mods for different games. Carefully following a mod author's instructions and seeing what the community is saying about the mod is the best way to insure you'll be able to get it up and running.
I will take you step-by-step through the process of installing mods for Oblivion, and soon you will be gaming like the rest of us! Note that these instructions are based on Windows 7
How To Load Minecraft Mods
Retrieved from 'https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php?title=How_to_install_Oblivion_mods&oldid=44711'
What has modular arithmetic got to do with the real world?
The answer any experienced programmer should give you is 'a lot'. Not only is it the basis for many an algorithm, it is part of the hardware.
Many programmers are puzzled by the mod, short for modulo, and integer division functions/operators found in nearly all languages.
Modular arithmetic used to be something that every programmer encountered because it is part of the hardware of every machine. You find it in the way numbers are represented in binary and in machine code or assembly language instructions.
Once you get away from the representation of numbers as bit strings and arithmetic via registers then many mod and remainder operations lose their immediate meaning so familiar to assembly language programmers.
You may not meet the mod function or operator in the course of learning to program, but once you start to write real code you will certainly meet it. As soon as you start implementing even the simplest of algorithms the need to understand mod will occur.
Passive and Active
The mod(x,y) function, or the mod operator x % y in C# or JavaScript say, is very simple but you can think about it at least two different ways - corresponding, roughly speaking, to passive and active models of what is going on.
Whenever you have a problem that involves chopping something up into regular sized groups the mod function/operator comes in handy for working out how to deal with the leftovers. it tells you the remainder after you have grouped x things into groups of size y.
This definition is a bit more difficult to follow but it's still trivial as long as you studied `clock arithmetic' as part of modern maths at school.
If you didn't then it's not too late.
Clock arithmetic
Imagine a clock face with numbers from 0 to y-1 then counting mod y is simply a process of advancing from number to number until you reach y-1 when you `roll over' to 0 and start the sequence again.
So counting mod 6 goes 0,1,2,3,4,5, 0,1,2,. and so on.
Notice that in counting mod 6 the integer 6 doesn't actually occur.
Similarly arithmetic mod y works by moving the clock's hand on or back by the required amount.
For example, 4+3 = 1 and 2-5 = 3 in arithmetic mod 6.
That is on a clock face numbered 0 to 5 start at 4 and move the hand on by 3 and it points to 1. Similarly starting at 2 and moving 5 back gets the hand to 3.
Multiplication and division work in exactly the same way once you remember that multiplication is repeated addition and division repeated subtraction.
How To Do Modulo
However it is generally easier to do the arithmetic ignoring the 'clock face' and then finding the representation of the result on the clock face. For example, 5*8 is 60 and if you start with the clock hand on 0 and move it sixty places on you end up at 4.
In programming all you have to do is to work out the arithmetic in the usual way e.g. 5*8=40 and then use the mod function to find its representation on the clock face -
mod(5*8,6)=mod(40,6)=4.
For another example consider arithmetic mod 7 then 4*2 in mod 7 is:
Mod(4*2,7)=Mod(8,7)=1
You can see that this image of a clock face and a pointer advancing is appropriate for all sorts of simulations of real world objects.
For example, a set of dials recording values in mixed units to different bases can be represented by counting in different mod bases.
Counting in yards, feet and inches (with 3 feet in a yard and 12 inches in a foot) you would use something like
inches=mod(inches+1,12)
Integer Division
Now we come to an interesting question; how to tell when a mod counter has rolled over.
Adding one to the counter each time is a bit too easy because you can simply test for the counter being at zero after an update.
A more interesting problem is how to check for roll over when an arbitrary value is added. For example, how do you discover how much to increment feet following
inches=mod(inches+inc,12)
The answer needs integer division which is mod's other half.
This is obvious if you think about Mod in its first interpretation as the remainder function. If you use Mod to divide up x things into groups of y then the remainder is what the clock dial shows. The number of groups of y that you formed is the number of times the clock 'rolled over'. You can find this out by working out the integer division of x by y i.e. how many whole times does y divide x - and this is integer division.
Mod finds the remainder on the clock and integer division find the `how many times the clock rolled over'.
Many languages do integer division naturally if you divide one integer type by another and there is no need for anything special.
But in dynamically typed languages dividing one integer by another automatically gives a floating point number and to convert back to integer you have to use a function something like int, trunc or floor depending on the language.
What you need is a function that simply chops off any fractional part of the number.
That is int(x/y) for example is the number of times y divides into x exactly - where int means 'take the integer part by truncating the result.
For example, int(2.9)=2, int(14/12)=1, int(25/12)=2 and so on.
Now we have a way to detect not only roll over but how many times the roll over occurred.
If you have a value x then mod(x,y) gives you the remainder that shows on the clock face and int(x/y) gives you the number of roll overs needed.
Putting this another way int(x/y) gives you the number of complete groups of y and mod(x,y) gives you the number left over.
Returning to the previous example we can now write the inches, feet and yards program as:
inches=mod(inches+inc,12)
Notice that in this case you don't even have to test for roll over because you can simply allow the addition of zero roll overs!
Integer division comes in useful whenever you are trying to chop something up into a number of parts.
Compare this to mod which is useful when you need to know what is left over after chopping something up into a number of parts.
For example, how many pages is 20000 lines of text taken 66 lines to a page?
Answer int(20000/66)=303 whole pages plus one with mod(20000,66) lines on the last page.
It isn't difficult to see that y*int(x/y) is the largest multiple of y smaller than or equal to x.
For example, 12*int(33/12)=24.
Equally obvious is that
x=y*int(x/y)+mod(x,y)
because if you add the remainder to the closest exact multiple of y then you get x back again!
This is the basis of the technique used by many a programmer to work out mod(x,y) when a mod function isn't available i.e.
How to remove windows activation watermark.
mod(x,y)= x-y*int(x/y)
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