Cal's Mod Guide For DD Dark Arisen

                     Cal's Mod Guide For DDDA

My first attempt at a simple guide to make your play through of Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen more enjoyable. Keeping in mind this will be a learning experience for me so the guide may not be perfect but hopefully it will be helpful for others wanting to do a once and done play through of the game with some mods but do not wish to go through the hassle of learning and figuring this all out themselves.

My PC specs

Ryzen 5800x

240GB SSD (OS)

500GB SSD (games)

500GB HDD (storage)

Windows 10 Education 20H2

Hoping to get a rtx 3080 soonish now that gpu prices have come down some!

Now without further Ado lets get to it!

We will be manually modding the game so no mod mangers used since vortex etc sometimes does not work properly when repacking arc files.

Arctool.exe which can be downloaded here. You want the actual ARCtool.rar and PC Batch files, found at same link as the arctool. The batch files will have several bat files for various games, we want the pc_dd.bat one.  You can also get both these files from steam.

7zip, available here, to unpack archives be they .rar or .zip files. I switched to this from winrar as winrar often will give errors you do not get with 7zip.

Using these two tools is quite easy. You need to place both the arctool.exe AND the pc_dd.bat into a folder by themselves.  When unpacking and repacking arc files you will be working in this folder.

Before doing anything else right click the pc_dd.bat file click edit and make sure the notepad looks like this:

arctool -xfs -dd -texRE6 -alwayscomp -pc -txt -v 7 %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Note the -xfs  that is most likely missing so just add that in and close and save the edit. Some mods require this -xfs to be able to pack and unpack certain files contained in the .arc files

What I did was make a "mod" folder on my desktop and I just put the mods I downloads themselves in there and I made another folder on my desktop called "new" in which I put in the arctool.exe and pc_dd.bat. These  mods are numbered as that is the order I am installing these in.  You need to know where the game is installed in your PC, for me it is D:/steamlibrary/steamapps/common/DDDA. We will be removing/adding files here.

To avoid repeating the same thing when downloading files you will likely have to unzip then using 7zip and it should give

you the folder or folders containing the modified files. Note when copy pasting you obviously have to say yes to replacing the files. If you have any troub