Massive new Dark Souls modding tool is an "absolute game changer" for the Fromsoftware classic
Though it only works with Dark Souls: Remastered for now
One prominent Dark Souls modder has created a massive new modding tool that could allow for even wackier, cooler creations to pop out of Lordran.
Grimrukh - who’s responsible for several fan-made Dark Souls expansions and mods - announced the tool in a social media post. "Soulstruct for Blender is now public," says the modder. "This a colossal Blender plugin for Dark Souls modding, four years in the making. Import and export map pieces, characters, objects, map collisions, navmeshes, and even Havok animation data."
Fellow modder Fromsoftserve responds by calling the toolset an "absolute game changer for my mod and the whole Dark Souls modding community." Navmeshes, for those who don’t already know, are what’s used in pathfinding so NPCs can probably move through an environment, rather than blindly run into walls, off ledges, or straight toward the players.
Fromsoftserve continues to explain what it all means in layman’s terms: "it’ll be so much easier to make complicated edits of meshes. Editing the collisions easily will enable entirely new areas to be created, greater customization of existing areas, etc." While the toolset only supports Dark Souls: Remastered now, Grimrukh has plans to bring it to "other games."
Dark Souls already has a great selection of mods - both cursed and just plain nice. One modder previously implemented alien machinery from Halo into the dark fantasy game, which was fun, gross, and hilarious in equal measure. Another improved the draw distances drastically, opening up even more opportunities to cheese boss fights. But these new tools should make those kinds of mods more frequent, and we’ll hopefully receive plenty more unofficial expansions to the FromSoftware classic.
If you haven’t checked in at Lordran for a while, check out the games like Dark Souls that you should play.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.