Yes, you read the title of the thread right. Torchlight the first.
With Torchlight 2 on the (vague) horizon, I thought it'd be high time to get back into some Torchlight action. My lack of a steady Internet connection has nothing to do with this, I swear. I've been having a blast, moreso than I first thought I would. And then I found the modding scene. Or rather, actually took note of it.
The modding scene for Torchlight is relatively comprehensive, though active contributors are predictably quite hard to find these days. Thankfully the existing content has been preserved (for the most part) on the site I will link at the end of this opening post. There's the odd piece that is hard to find, or one class modification that you can't download anymore . . . but everything hosted directly on the fansite is good to get.
And boy, some of it is pretty damn good.
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But Gorb, Torchlight is single-player. What's the point of all this?
The purpose of this thread is to serve as a discussion point/sounding board for people who are at all interesting in Torchlight mods, how to use them, how to combine them and so on. Discuss your favourite mods, compare them, whatever. I'm not expecting a stellar response given the age of the game, but there is a lot of decent content out there that is hampered by the pain that is getting mods working in Torchlight.
So, how do you get mods working in Torchlight? The developers provided an in-house tool (suite), TorchED. You can ignore that unless you actually want to mod the game. The community have various tools that are supposed to help with converting classes that haven't been finalised, and tweaking this that and the other. They're a massive pain and they don't always work for what you want them to do. Feel free to use them if they work for you (the fansite's Hotspot modification manager is the main one), but they didn't for me.
The key file, assuming you want to play around with all of the custom game classes modders have made, is charactercreate.dat (all .dat files are readable in Notepad).
Typically the readme tells you to paste or extract (if archived) the mod files into ../%appdata%/runic games/torchlight/mods. This doesn't always work. Be careful when installing mods, and only install one at a time (unless you're sure all of your custom classes look professional enough).
Steps to take:
- Extract your archive; class mods will usually be contained in their own folder, i.e. "Fury" or "Abomination_v2.5". I typically rename them with a prefix so I don't get confused as to what mod does what.
- Does your mod contain a new class? If it does, you will need to combine that mod's charactercreate.dat file with your existing version. This is so that the main menu/New Character UI doesn't break.
- Open up the mod's charactercreate.dat (Mod_Name/media/UI/charactercreate.dat - if it doesn't exist, odds are your mod doesn't add a class. If you're sure it does, skip this step but DON'T SKIP SUBSEQUENT STEPS).
- Open up your existing charactercreate.dat (if you only have one class mod installed, you don't need to worry. Just go to step 3) and copy and paste the section containing the class UI data (see Appendix, below).
- Rename the name to match your modded class' name. Save and exit.
- Run the .bat file that should be knocking around at least one of your modifications. It's usually called cleanup.bat or remove_binary.bat - this will delete any existing compiled mod files knocking around so that when Torchlight starts, it recreates it all from scratch. Check the Appendix below for the script it runs.
- Delete mods.dat (as found in %appdata%/runic games/torchlight/mods).
- Run Torchlight. Depending on the number and type of mods you have installed, this can take quite a long time.
- Enjoy your mods!
And remember to be careful, if a mod you're using replaces something, that there are no conflicts (for example having two pet mods that replace the standard Dog pet with something else)! If Torchlight hangs and is forced to close, or if you get a Runtime C++ error, you've messed something up.
Appendix:
remove_binary.bat script contents (if you need/wish to create it yourself):
Code:
REM Remove all the compiled mod files
del "..\..\*.adm" /Q/F/S
del "..\..\*.cmp" /Q/F/S
REM Remove the aggregate mod files
del "..\..\massfile.dat" /F
del "..\..\masterresourceunits.dat" /F
Class UI code you should be looking to copy/paste:
Code:
<Window Type="GuiLook/StandardButton" Name="Shaman">
<Property Name="UnifiedPosition" Value="{{0,-5},{0,270}}" />
<Property Name="UnifiedSize" Value="{{0,152},{0,28}}" />
<Property Name="Text" Value="Shaman"/>
<Property Name="ID" Value="9" />
<Property Name="Tooltip" Value="Select Shaman" />
<Property Name="onClick" Value="guiSelect1" />
</Window>
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The mods I have installed:
I also have the God of War font text and a revamped GUI that I can't remember the name of. I combined them into my own mod folder (Combination v0.1) simply because getting everything working together was a pain.
An ingame screenshot of how my stuff turns out. The combination mod I'm using (Pet_Mod) replaces the class icons with simple text representations, I don't mind the change personally. I could get icons back in if I modded the UI myself, but that's a pain for another day. And yes, I know the left-hand box isn't aligned correctly 
Link to the Runic Games Fansite repository of TL1 modifications. Have fun!
I don't mind if this thread doesn't get a lot of attention. Hopefully some Torchlight lovers will find it useful! Failing that, I can just slap Supernaut until he agrees to reinstall the game 
Gamer's Lounge mods, feel free to edit the thread title if it's not that transparent.
