Hey, I have decided to make series of guides to tech you how to mod you Diablo 2 Resurrected even if you have zero experience with it and dont want to spend hours learning it. I will try to explain steps needed for changes in a easy way so anyone can do it. But I hope it might bring few new people into D2R modding community also.
My guides are for Offline PC version of game.
I plan to make a lot of guides like this in future, mostly targeting on stuff people ask for a lot or useful changes to make life easier or to make D2R experience more interesting/challenging. This first episode is quite long, but most of it is about setting up game files and programs you will need so future guides will be far shorter, because you can always go back to this one for basics.
EPISODE 1 - How to show Item levels on items
Required files: Weapons.txt, Armor.txt, Misc.txt
Required software: Ladik’s Casc Viewer, AFJ Sheet, Visual Studio Code
Difficulty: Very easy
One important note before we start, always do back up of your save files and files you mod in case something will go wrong. And anytime you are doing some changes, always keep your game turned off. In my experience even accessing txt files with AFJ sheet while you are in game can crash your game. And it almost killed me once while I played Hardcore online and just checked files for certain information. So do your changes in files, and then you can run the game.
Getting what we need for change
AFJ sheet, Ladik’s Casc Viewer and Visual Studio Code can be downloaded here:
https://www.d2rmodding.com/utilities
Download all 3 programs and extract them where you want. AFJ sheet will be used to edit txt files we will extract from the game. For that we need to use Ladik’s Casc Viewer. You can run 64 or 32 bit version of Viewer based on your system. Visual Code studio is used for changing or creating JSON type files D2R is using.
Some of you maybe done this before as extracting files for faster loading in game is done in same way. But we will not need to extract 40 Gigabytes in this case. Run the Ladik’s Casc Viewer, click on “Open storage” and pick your Diablo 2 Resurrected folder (place where your game is installed)
After process is finished, you will see game files from game with content of folders on the right side.
We will need content of excel folder under Data/data/global/excel so just left click on it to see mostly txt and bin files on the the right side and with excel folder highlighted, click on “Extract” on top:
Choose your path where to extract the files (I suggest to not extract it into your D2R folder right away but keep it separated in another folder) and click on “OK”
After extraction is done, go to folder where you extracted files and you will see this if you go to deepest level:
Now we have to prepare folder structure in your D2R installation folder so we will be able to run your mod separated from your normal game with own saves. It is not required to do it like this, but you would have to download all 40 gigabytes of data otherwise. I will provide link at the end of guide with explanation what is your other option.
Now open your D2R folder and if you already dont have it there, create folder named “mods”
For this guide I will be calling my mod as “test” but you can use any name you like. Go to “mods” folder and create there new folder “test” and in it another folder called “test.mpq”. In “test.mpq” create folder “data”, in data folder “global” and in global create last one called “excel” (If your mod is called “adam” it will be: “mods/adam/adam.mpq/data/global/excel”).
We need to create another special file which will tell the game to use our newly made folders so run the program “Visual Studio Code” and create new text file from list on top:
In in the window type down instruction you can see below or on picture. You can just use my text below and copy–>paste it there.
{
“name”: “test”,
“savepath”: “test/”
}
It should look like this:
Name is name of your mod and savepath is for creating new save folder structure for character saves and game setting so everything is separated.
We are done with our JSON file so “save as”. Pick JSON as type of file and type “modinfo” as name of your file.
You can save the file anywhere you want and after you are done, place that file into your folder structure you previously made so its on same level as “data” folder:
We are done with folder structure and everything is prepared, so now you can copy content of previously extracted gata/global/excel folder into your newly made mod file structure in D2R. You can either copy just misc.txt, armor.txt and weapons.txt or all txt files as you might need to mod other files in future. It should look like this for just our 3 files we will mod now:
Just keep in mind that if game is updated to newer patch version, you either need to download txt or some json files again and recreate your changes again, or to modify your older txt files accordingly with new blizzard changes. For example in last patch they added some new columns in txt files so you would have to expand your exisitng ones to match that. Or if you would not update json files for names of game objects, you might be experiencing some issues with not seeing names of items and other stuff properly. I will be talking about changes in JSON files in some future guides, for now we dont really need them with exception of that one time action we did to create modinfo.json.
You maybe also noticed one special file in extracted files in excel folder from Ladik´s Viewer called as “_diabloiidatafileguide”. This is gift to all modders from Blizzard team and its a guide for txt files so you can understand what every column there do and you can see options what to put there. So definitely keep the guide if you are more interested in modding than just change we do in this guide.
How to use AFJ sheet and change file content
Hard part is honestly behind us and now we will do the change to show item levels in game. Run “AFJ sheet” and find and open 3 files: Misc.txt, Weapons.txt and Armor.txt under global/excel folder.
If you go to first open file Mis.txt you can see Columns and Rows filled with data. We can do various things here. First Column and Row can be locked in place to help you see what you modify as you move between rows and columns. You can also add new rows or columns, delete them or hide them for example. But we will not need it now. If texts in cells is not fully visible you can double click on column lines between two columns to adjust size of cell to text inside.
Change to show item levels
Its up to you on which items you want to see item level. We will need Weapons.txt for weapons, Armor.txt for armor and Misc.txt for Jewels, Amulets, Rings and Charms.
Change is quite simple, go to Misc.txt and adjust size of first row so you see full text and lock the first column and row in place. You can see rows for Amulet and Ring on the picture below and under Column “E” you can see “ShowLevel”. So go into cells where column E and Amulet/ring rows meet and place number 1 there instead of 0. Do the same for Jewels and Charms. You can find them on rows 98,99,100 and 138.
Save your work with icon on the panel and you are done with Misc.txt:
Now do the same for weapons and armor and change 0 to 1 in all items you want to see with item levels. Armor.txt have “ShowLevel” column under “O” and Weapons.txt under “AF”. When you are done, SAVE again for both and you can close the AFJ Sheet.
How to activate the change in game
Our change is finished but game is primarily using own files instead of our new files we changed. In order to see change in game, we need to run game with special parameter. So make a shortcut of your D2R.exe, right click—>properties and add “-mod test -txt” at the end in target. If your name of mod is different just replaced the "test"there with your name.
You can still also add additional parameters like -enablerespec for example btw. We are pretty much finished and we can test the change.
Testing the change
When you will run the game after all we have done with our new shortcut D2R.exe, you will be required to adjust your game setting again and you will not have anything in stash and not have any characters because your game is accessing new save structure it just recreated in new place.
If you want to play with everything you had before and use older setting, go to where your saves are located. Usualy its under: users/yourname/savedgames/Diablo II Resurrected. If you go into that folder, you should see your actual character saves and newly created folder “mods” there also. So copy your character files, settings,custum.key and stash files into mods/test/ in order to have in your modded game everything you had before.
Your characters in clean version of D2 will of course not update when you play your modded version of game so keep that in mind. If you for example no longer wish to play with changes, simply copy your character files back to original place from your modded save folder. If you will do some extensive modifications to game, its possible that clean version of game will not be able to handle character or stash files with changes.
Now we finaly test our change and run the game from newly made shortcut and if you have done everything right, you will see item levels as I do on picture below:
Final words
If you play both offline and online, you will be using shortcut version with -mod test -txt parameter for offline for playing with your changes and using Battle net launcher client to run game in online as you are not supposed to be playing with modified game in online mode.
I highly suggest to keep doing back up of your txt files and save files in case something goes wrong with your changes and you would need to go back to previous state
If you want to use optional way to run your mod when you use -Direct -txt or get some additional info about some basic modding, visit this video guide from Bonesy:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to D2R Modding - Episode 2 (Modding 101) - YouTube
Plese if you have any feedback or issue, share it here so i can correct the guide.
And you can let me know what kind of changes you would like to see in future,
Part of why I also don’t want rune/gem stacking.