An ambitious mod management tool for the original Baldur's Gate games just got a massive overhaul

Modding is one of PC gaming's greatest pleasures. It's also a pain in the neck, especially as you go back and tinker with old games so they can be enjoyed on a modern system. All too often, it turns into a tangle of compatibility issues and bugs that you may have even introduced yourself with the wrong combination of mods; if your particular poison is the original Baldur's Gate games, though, you may want to take a look at EET Mod Forge.

The web-based tool is a mod manager of sorts that gives you some information about how your game will look and warn you away from gamebreaking mod conflicts, whether you build off one of the site's preset modlists or make your own. It's billed as an "install order builder," and features 640 different mods so far.

It just got a big 2.0 version about a week after its initial release, both of which were shared by creator anprionsa on Reddit. The new overhaul lets you preview NPC portrait art in case "multiple mods compete for the same portrait," and tracks in-engine caps for certain things, like kits, so "you know before you install if you've exceeded a limit."

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There's also a new preset, "Mod Forge Ultimate," which piles a mind-bending 475 mods into one list—the update notes state that "every single install category was reviewed mod-by-mod with component-level conflict resolution." If you're wondering how someone could be warping their install so much that they'd need a tool like this to keep everything straight, there's a particularly extreme use case for you.

Toying around with the old-school games still might not be as straightforward as dropping Thomas the Tank Engine people into your Baldur's Gate 3 save without so much as leaving the main menu, but this tool signifies that the mod scene for the classics is still going strong and finding ways to tone down the esotericism for newcomers. Anything with the power to stop my saves from breaking is a welcome boon indeed.