Before you start modding AEW: Fight Forever, you should make sure you have a legal copy of the game ready to install from Steam. If you don't own the game yet, you should consider buying a version of the game that includes all available DLC as some mods may not work without it.
In order to run mods with the game, your hardware should at least meet the minimum requirements system requirements. You will also need some additional hard drive space to account for the additional mod files and downloaded archives.
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-3550 / AMD FX 8150 | Intel i7-4790 / AMD FX 8350 |
| Memory | 8 gigs | 16 gigs |
| Graphics | GeForce GTX 1060 / Radeon RX 480 | GeForce GTX 1070 / Radeon RX 580 / Intel® Arc™ A380 Graphics |
| Storage | 25 gigs min | 80 gigs recommended |
We recommend you install this game in a Steam library on a disk separate from your operating system and on an SSD (or NVME) drive for the best experience. Run the game unmodified at least once to sign in to all necessary services.
important: read all instructions carefully
The instructions below are for an older version of the launcher. It functionally will still work but is a bit more limited than the above. The only thing from these instructions you should follow if you choose to use the newer launcher are the intructions on disabling online.
In order to run AEW: Fight Forever with mods, you need a custom launcher, available from Sprite's github repo. Download the files AEW_CustomLauncher.exe and z_DisableOnline_P.pak from this page. Keep them someplace handy -- in a moment you'll be copying them into the game folder.
Navigate to the game's content folder. If you've installed to the default Steam library on Drive C:, this will be at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AEWFightForever\AEWFightForever\Content\Paks. This folder will contain many very large files called pakchunks, which contain the actual game contents. Copy z_DisableOnline_P.pak into this folder -- right next to the rest of the default game assets. This is the only mod that goes in this folder.
While you are here, press Ctrl-Shift-N or right-click and create a new folder here. Name it ~mods, including the tilde! This is where all your mods go. You will need to know where this folder is, because all mods go here, so you might want to pin it to Windows' Quick Access in Explorer.
Navigate to the game's binaries folder. If you've installed to the default Steam library on drive C:, this will be at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AEWFightForever\AEWFightForever\Binaries\Win64. You know you have the right folder, if there is a file called AEWFightForever-Win64-Shipping.exe here. Copy AEW_CustomLauncher.exe into this folder. Then, for future convenience, you can create a shortcut on the Desktop for this launcher by right-clicking it, clicking on Create Shortcut (or More Options > Create Shortcut on Windows 11), then dragging the shortcut that is created in that folder onto the desktop.
You can easily switch back and forth between modded offline and vanilla online!
The custom launcher will launch the game with mods, in Offline Only mode, while running the game normally via Steam or the original desktop launcher will allow for online play.
The best place to go to get mods for AEW: Fight Forever is Nexus Mods. Once you have registered a free account you'll have access to all available mods.
The main types of mod you'll find for this game are listed below.
| Mod Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Standard (.pak) | Most mods fit under this description -- any changes to gameplay or visuals probably fall under this. It is possible to run into pakchunk conflicts if mod makers used the same pakchunk index to create the mod; it is also possible to crash the game if two mods attempt to alter the same resource. |
| Music mods | The music bank in-game must be modified from the game's current version, or else all audio will break in-game after an update. It's possible to download the full audio bank from Nexus, but it is strongly discouraged, as it probably won't work after updates, and you can only have one audio bank at a time. The process for cooking mods together into an audio bank is detailed here, based on Peek's Criware toolkit. |
| Tron mods | A special case of cooking, tron mods can't conflict with one another but if multiple mods overwrite the same tron, only the last one in the load order will be read. |
| LUA mods | While we don't have any released LUA mods in the community at the moment, a number of modders are working on this avenue of modding. Lua-based mods are logic mods that can dramatically alter how a game runs, but as a result, they're a lot more complicated to make. They require UE4SS to be installed before they'll work. |
| Save Profiles | These are create-a-wrestler save profiles that require being merged into the savegame via a special process using UE4SS -- the process is detailed in this guide. |
For the most convenient modding experience, you can use a mod manager to download, install and manage mod files without having to ever open the game folder yourself. At the moment, Vortex is the only available mod manager.
Vortex cannot handle mod types outside of standard .pak files and tron replacements. Music mods require cooking into an audio bank and should be installed manually.
| Name | Summary | Read More |
|---|---|---|
| Vortex | The official mod manager of Nexus Mods. | More Info |
All mods that are cooked as pak files should be unzipped to the ~mods folder as described in the setup instructions. Most mods will contain three files named the same but with different extensions: .pak, .utoc and .ucas . All three files must be present in ~mods to work.
Tron and audio bank mods (after being cooked) do not need .utoc, .ucas or pakchunk IDs, only the .pak file, and can be installed by copying in just the .pak file.
Lua mods need to be unpacked into the UE4SS mods folder -- this will be fleshed out when we have mods as examples.
AEW mods are VERSION DEPENDENT. If you have a mod that changes datatables (such as gameplay modification mods), and those tables were changed between versions, then the game may not work properly afterward. For this reason, there are some mods on Nexus that are only compatible up to version 1.05 -- though this is a very small category of mods.
Unreal Engine requires pakchunk IDs for every cooked mod / DLC, which means every mod will have a unique number assigned to it. If two mods have the same pakchunk ID, the game will very likely crash (probably with a simple Fatal Error and no indicator as to why it failed). For this reason, we strongly discourage that people download a large number of mods and install them all at once -- slow and steady is the best way to mod and maintain your sanity.
If you get a Fatal Error at any time during your attempt at modding the game, first try simply running the game again. Sometimes, a modded game will crash without any indicator as to why, but it will run fine the next time you try it. If the game consistently crashes, then we recommend troubleshooting by taking out your most recently added mods until you can run the game modded again.
It is possible to come across two mods that conflict only in pakchunk numbers, and otherwise would work fine together. This is an extremely rare situation, but if you want to attempt to deconflict the mods and get them running together, this Conflict Manager exists and although it was designed for the Hogwarts community, it works with other Unreal Engine games as well.