Subtitle: A Reasonably Lengthy And Not-At-All Short Guide to Modding with RPFM – Without Pictures Until I Learn Mediawiki A Bit Better

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Chapter 0 - Introduction

What are WH2 mods and what can they do?

Broadly speaking, mods are .pack files which contain basically every piece of WH2 data you’ll need – models, stats, text, animations, spells, scripts, numbers. RPFM, Rusted Pack File Manager, is a tool to edit pack files. Therefore, you need to use RPFM for basically every WH2 mod you'll make. This guide will be aimed at WH2, but the ideas are the same for the other games.

It’s also possible to edit pack files with PFM (Pack File Manager) or the TW: Assembly Kit (fondly called asskit), but neither of these are recommended: the former is just old and has a habit of eating your entire mod up, and the second just doesn’t work well for modders. If a guide references PFM a lot it’s quite outdated and you should probably search around for a more updated one.

Also, before you begin, I recommend setting up a folder somewhere to stash your mods, RPFM, and other stuff. We’ll need it later. Mine is C:\REDACTED\OtherGameStuff\Warhammer2ExceptNeat

Chapter 1 - Getting RPFM

The best place to get your hands on RPFM is by checking the #rpfm channel on Da Modding Den Discord server. Chances are the latest version is pinned in the pinned. However, you should also be able to get it from this link (hello did mediawiki link embed work?) Which, at the moment, looks a bit like this:

screenshot.jpg (no that's not an actual screenshot I'll work out how to do pictures later)

At the time of writing (which is outdated already), the current version is v2.3.2. RPFM will doubtlessly have more additions and changes as time goes on (the change from RPFM v1 to v2 was quite something), but the idea should still be the same: it does things with Pack Files. The buttons might move about, but they should do the same stuff.

As for downloading it: assuming you’re on Windows, it’s the download that has ‘rpfm-something-something-windows’ in it:

screenshot.jpg

At the moment, RPFM is nicely packaged into a .zip folder, which you can extract with almost anything, but previous versions were packaged into a .7z folder. I reccomend unpacking these with 7zip. 7zip is pretty straightforward to download and install: just grab any of the ones that say "windows" and, if it doesn’t seem to work, try the next one. In any case, 7-zip is beyond the scope of this guide.

Anyway, extract RPFM into your mod folder and you should end up with something like this:

screenshot.jpg

It’s not truly neccessary, but we’ll make a shortcut to RPFM so we don’t have to get lost down this rabbithole of folders each time we want to open it (and you’ll want to open it a lot). Find rpfm.exe (that’s the program – I don't know what the other ones do. In earlier, or perhaps later, versions of RPFM the executable name might change. Try running things until it works), right-click, and Create Shortcut:

screenshot.jpg

Select that and move it to somewhere memorable. Desktop works fine – at the moment mine is in my WH2 mods folder:

screenshot.jpg

That’s RPFM! Open it up and – for this version, in any case – it should look at least a little like:

screenshot.jpg

(though the icon in the middle of the screen might be different).

Chapter 2 - Setting RPFM Up

I will return to continue this!