GD-DPS with Grim Dawn EU Lite MOD

A Data Patching System for Grim Dawn

Forewarning: This system, and the accompanying mod, was designed to work with the fully expanded game: Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods are mandatory. Crucible is not. While you need the complete game to install the Grim Dawn EU Lite MOD, you can still benefit from what the patching system can offer, providing you are willing to modify part of it yourself.

The creator of this MOD and accompanying windows batch files take no responsibility should nefarious usage comes of it either by malevolent modifications to it of simply by mistakes...

You can edit, modify and redistribute parts or the whole "patching system" without asking for explicit permission.

Backing up your save files before starting a newly modded game for the first time is highly recommended.

Update procedure if you want to install the latest version over a previous version:

See the included readme file for instructions on how to update.

Simple installation procedures for those that just want to quickly install/test the mod:

You should not play this mod with an existing character if it is above level 50. A fresh start is recommended.

A - Download and extract the whole content of the MOD ZIP file to the Grim Dawn working folder. This is the folder that contain the "Grim Dawn.exe" 32 bit file. NOT the "x64" folder! That one as the 64 bit executable.

B - Parts of the mod can be deactivated should you not want them. Check out the list of . AHK files freshly extracted from the above step. The filenames describe what they do. If you want to deactivate a specific patch, simply delete that file or change the extension to something else like ".unused".

C - From the game working folder, browse to and select the file named "Install GD-DPS MOD.bat". Double-click it to launch it.

• []The installation process will most likely take more than 10 minutes. Read the message that appears and navigate your way thru the choices, if any.

  []The installation operates in a console windows. All inputs are made with the keyboard.

  []If you click the inside of the console window, anywhere, it may prevent the window from updating. The process is still going on but it is not showing. You need to press a key with the window focused to unpause it. This is very annoying, I know, so be careful, please. :)

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  This is the result of a few months of intense fiddling around with Grim Dawn mod tools. It started as a simple question: "Can Grim Dawn data be easily and automatically modified between game update using a 'patching' mechanism"? So this premise led the foundation for an elaborate modding mechanism that function as follow:

  1 - It uses only readily available free tools from the Internet. Currently, it uses some of the tools Crate graciously distributed as part of the game as well as some third party ones:

  Crate's AssetManager

  Crate's MapCompiler

  Crate's ArchiveTool

  Custom programmed utilities for handling archives and map decompiling: ARZARC and unMap

  Microsoft's windows batch scripting language, part of any Microsoft OS since MS-DOS

  The one and only AutoHotkey (https://www.autohotkey.com/download/)

  The indispensable MD5 Command Line Message Digest Utility (https://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/)

  The lightning fast FFMPEG (https://ffmpeg.org/)

  The noble 7-Zip Archiver (https://www. 7-zip.org/)

  (Optional but highly recommended) NotePad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/)

  2 - The process is completely automated. It flows somewhat like this:

  - Starting from a fully up to date "Forgotten Gods" expanded working, moded or not, copy of the game. A backup of all the game ARZ and ARC compressed archives is created in a sub-folder of the game working folder.

  - This backup is then fully extracted, including the GDX2 . MAP file, in parallel executing threads when possible . From there,  it serves as a restore point, so to speak, for the game. The backup is never altered in any way whatsoever.

  - Using AutoHotkey powerful regular expression evaluator, an arbitrary numbers of . AHK scripts files that are designed to target and modify specific data in the game database records are ran, again in parallel when po