frigid spade
Umodel - a tool most to all of you know of. It allows you to inspect a PAK file. A PAK file is often what Unreal Engine games ship with. It houses most of the game’s assets. Umodel is READ ONLY but can extract some types of assets out of the PAK
Fmodel - a lesser-known but objectively better alternative to Umodel. It supports things like having a peak at .Umap assets, immediate asset JSON serialization (great for getting to know the asset you’re looking at besides just the name), and PLENTY exclusive features and QOL improvements over Umodel.
Universal Unreal Unlocker - the non-paid version is years out of date, but is still packaged with many essentials.
- reconstruct Console (hit or miss)
- Freecam
- misc. game adjustments (e.g. Player size, Game speed. Etc)
- Hotsampling
The Pro version expands on all of this to make things like free cam cinematics better with keyframing and lights editing.
Unreal Mod Unlocker - this tool most notably allows the game to search for and prioritize loading LOOSE versions of the game assets so you can store the assets outside of the PAK (but in same folder structure and directory as found within the PAK) and it will replace the version in the PAK with the loose version at runtime.
The pro version is more feature rich, but it’s less relevant
Unreal Mod Launcher - Allows you to literally create your own mods into the game. First you must find the unreal engine version that your target game was packaged with (SOTN = UE 4.26) and then download the respective unreal engine version from the epic launcher. Name your new project the same as found on your game’s shipping.exe (excluding win32/64shipping). Create a blank game project. Then, in the content browser, create 2 folders; Mods and then the name of your mod. Inside of that folder, create a blueprint actor with the name “ModActor”. Go to the blueprint graph of this actor and create a custom function. Name it ModMenuButtonPressed. Add an Int output (I forgot what you name it. Probably “Index”) and then drag out that pin and do Switch on Int. Add a String Array to the actor and name it ModButtons. Each string in this array will be the names of the buttons. And it will correlate to the pins out of the switch on Int node. This is your entry point to modding. I like to find functions in FModel of cool assets and then create a dummy actor with the same functions’ names to call from my mod actor. Then, create a Primary Asset Label to assign those mod assets to chunk 10. Then, copy the Pakchunk10 and name it the same as your mod name in the content browser and place it in a folder called “LogicMods” where your Shipping.exe is found. Then, run UML before your game (with profile added for the game within the UML configs) and then press F1 to open your mod interface. With your mod buttons
glacial cobalt
