At this moment, Larian Studios has officially revealed a rollout strategy for the sanctioned Baldur’s Gate 3 advanced tools. The Exclusive Testing Phase is commencing today, however, only accessible to a handpicked selection of creators within the community, with plans for gradual expansion in the future.

In the upcoming month, Larian intends to open registrations for a Trial Run event accommodating approximately 1K participants. The ultimate objective is to unveil the advanced tools alongside Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 7 in September.

As previously communicated, the toolkit will facilitate the development of mods compatible across different platforms through the partnership with mod.io. Here’s a glimpse of what modders can anticipate with the toolkit itself:

• Utilize the editor to craft your unique mods.
• Directly upload mods to mod.io servers.
• Access read-only level loading to view all local entities, setups, and test your mods in-game during the creation process.
• Utilize internal editors for supported asset types like textures and visual models, enabling direct overrides within your mod through the developer interface.
• Publish your mod via the editor for moderation and visibility in the in-game browser, or prepare your mod locally for upload to a third-party platform.
• Modify mod UIs through file edits. Documentation will be provided to explain internal setups addressing mod loading and compatibility challenges.
• Within Baldur’s Gate 3, you will be able to:
  • Download and manage your mods directly.
  • Administer multiplayer and save game files through a verification UI.

An internal vetting process overseen by mod.io will determine the availability of Baldur’s Gate 3 mods on consoles. However, console mods are anticipated to have restrictions – such as no direct alteration of levels or core game components (e.g., story, cinematics, dialogues, quests, and local gameplay adjustments) due to ‘technical limitations’ and ‘platform-specific guidelines’.

Nevertheless, on PC, unofficial mods (akin to what has been observed so far) will continue to be fully endorsed. These unregulated mods can still be locally packaged using mod.io’s toolkit and uploaded to alternative mod platforms, according to Larian.

This implies that these mods can still be manually downloaded, recognized by the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod browser, and manageable in the game’s mod load sequence. Yet, since they are local and alter unsupported systems, there will not be built-in support for update checks and synchronization in multiplayer scenarios.