XCOM has now been out for a little over a week and our forums have been buzzing with users trying to get in to the game and mod it as much as possible. We’ve made headway in a number of areas and hit stumbling blocks in others, but every day new discoveries are being made.

First of all you’ll notice that the first mods have popped up in our file database which provide a number of INI tweaks. You’ll find a number of different takes on balancing XCOM and changing settings to either make it harder, easier or more like the original XCOM. Particular mods of note include the second wave tweak that enables a setting disabled by Firaxis for a second playthrough of the game using special modifiers. Before leaving 2K, 2K Greg announced on the official XCOM forums that the Second Wave settings exist but were never finished by Firaxis before release. As such, some settings work, some don’t. Still, it will make a second playthrough of your game different and more interesting for you. The Anti-Cheat mod also includes changes that make UFOs attempting terror and abduction missions visible on the geoscape, so they can be shot down which is both a bonus and a curse.

At the moment most INI changes require modifications of your XCOM exe file. This presents two issues; the first being that uploading EXE files would be a copyright violation and as such Nexus user dreadylein has created a modpatcher utility that makes creating INI modifications easy for mod authors, and makes your job patching your EXE file much, much easier. Unfortunately this is the only way to do it right now, unless you want to modify the EXE yourself. A big thanks to dreadylein who took the early initiative and has enabled us to easily share our mods thus far. The second issue is that you can currently only run one EXE modification at a time. So if you want to use two mods together you can’t without getting your hands dirty and doing some modifying yourself. The hope is that at some point we’ll be able to make multiple edits of the EXE to get as many changes running as possible.

To help out modders Nexus user Xionanx has compiled a great extensive list of modifiable settings within the DefaultGameCore.ini file along with a description of what the settings do. To further help us, Nexus user PepprmintButler (who’s been a great help throughout the XCOM modding scene) has moved that list over to a wiki page so that others can help in classifying all the modifiable settings within the DefaultGameCore.ini file. If you want to help out, you can login to the wiki with your Nexus username and password and help to build and expand on the information already present. Don’t forget to visit the thread where it’s all happening.

Whilst modding XCOM is currently confined to modifying the INI files people are also exploring the UPK files that contain all the assets for the game. Progress has been made on opening and extracting some of these UPK files but the real issue is finding a way to recook the assets after they’ve been modified. If this can be worked out then XCOM modding will become much, much bigger with far wider implications for modifying the game. If you have experience in modding other Unreal Engine titles, or are willing to explore this topic further then I’m sure a lot of people will be very thankful for your help.

As always the place you need to be to look in to modding XCOM is on our forums where there are lots of people trying to do all sorts of cool things. A good place to start is the finding the first step thread where a lot of the early developments have happened.