Loading...
Loading...
Mods and Steam Workshop
August 26, 2026 at 07:09 AM
Initial version covering the July support policy, the withdrawn August Workshop plan, and what applies now
DragonSword: Awakening ships without official mod support, and as of late August 2026 that has not changed. What did change over a few days in August is how much the studio had said about the subject, and then unsaid. Hound13 published a detailed Steam Workshop support plan with a full set of Mod Guidelines on August 24, 2026, and withdrew the entire document on August 25 after community reaction, stating that none of it had been enacted and that the direction of Workshop support would be reconsidered from the beginning.
The sequence matters because the withdrawn document is still the most detailed thing the studio has ever published about mods, and it is easy to mistake for policy. It is not. Nothing in it is in force.
There is no Steam Workshop integration in the game.
No mod policy is being enforced, and no enforcement is planned.
Mods outside Steam Workshop and third-party modding tools have never been officially permitted, and that has not changed either way.
The studio does not support mods or save editors and will not investigate or restore progress where one is the likely cause.
Whether Workshop support happens at all is open again.
The first statement on the subject came on July 27, 2026, four days after launch, in response to a run of questions about mod tools and save editors. It is a support-scope notice rather than a rules document, and unlike the August material it was never retracted, so it remains the studio's operative position.
Its substance is narrow. Hound13 does not support mods or save-file editing. Accounts where a mod or a save edit is the likely cause of a problem will not be investigated, and lost progress will not be recovered. The notice names corrupted progress, unrecoverable quest states, and failed patch installations as the specific risks, and recommends periodic manual backups of the save folder inside the game's Saved directory. That advice is repeated in Update History alongside the launch-window crash workarounds.
On August 24 the studio published an advance notice titled as a Steam Workshop support plan, together with a linked Mod Guidelines document. It said Workshop support was being prepared, that an opening schedule would follow in a separate notice, and that once Workshop was live, mods complying with the guidelines would be permitted.
The guidelines were unusually specific for a plan that had not shipped. They listed categories on both sides.
Position | Examples given |
|---|---|
Would have been permitted | Player-made free character skins; texture and colour changes; partial appearance changes such as glasses, capes and accessories; field-of-view, interface and quality-of-life improvements; gameplay mods that raise difficulty or add new challenge |
Would have been prohibited | Mods unlocking downloadable content or bypassing purchase requirements; trainers, cheats, and anything lowering difficulty for unfair advantage; unlicensed use of third-party intellectual property; content infringing copyright or portrait rights; mods using unreleased or non-public characters, models, data or content; extraction and redistribution of the game's own assets; content replicating official paid content or substituting for its purchase; features bypassing achievements, progression, rewards or content unlocks; explicit sexual content; paid or paywalled mods; anything posing a security risk such as malware or unauthorised data collection; content impersonating official material |
Two further provisions drew the most attention. The notice stated that Co-Op would be unavailable in any environment where mods were active or where game files had been modified, that co-op would be supported only in unmodified installations, and that even permitted Workshop mods would disable co-op while active. Separately, it disclaimed technical support for mod-related problems, listing crashes, save corruption, performance degradation, graphical and gameplay errors, progression blocks, mod conflicts, and mods breaking after updates as issues outside the support scope, with a request that players reproduce any problem in a clean installation first.
The document also set out a list of behaviours the studio framed as clarifications of existing policy rather than new restrictions, covering datamined and unreleased content, asset extraction, purchase and ownership bypasses, and interference with updates or integrity checks. It said the studio might ask a creator to stop distributing such content, or ask a distribution platform to remove it.
The withdrawal came the following day, August 25. It is short, and its framing is worth reading closely because it does not soften the reversal.
Hound13 apologised for causing significant confusion and concern, said the Mod Guidelines document was retracted and would not be enforced, and stated that the policies in the announcement had not been enacted and that nothing had been applied. On the cause, the studio said it had become aware of a few mods made in ways outside its direct control and had judged it appropriate to share standards in advance, but that the notice had been written in a level of detail and tone more suited to formally enacted regulations. That, it said, created the impression restrictions were already in force and had a chilling effect on community creative activity. It acknowledged that its preliminary review had been insufficient.
The commitment that followed was to reconsider the direction of Steam Workshop support from the beginning, and to review and communicate with the community before publishing announcements of that kind in future.
Two things survived the retraction, and the studio was explicit that they are requests rather than rules, carrying no measures and no enforcement plans: not infringing the rights of players who have bought the game or its downloadable content, and not making unauthorised use of content that has not been officially released.
The studio's own account is the clearest available explanation, and it points at register rather than substance. A document written as though it were already binding, published for a feature that did not exist yet, read as a crackdown rather than as guidance. The co-op lockout and the breadth of the prohibited list gave that reading something concrete to attach to.
The wider context is a game sold as a complete single purchase with no gacha and no subscription, whose audience has been vocal about that positioning since before launch. See Buy-to-Play Model for how central that framing has been to the game's reception. A policy document arriving in that setting was always going to be read against it.
Steam Workshop is no longer a scheduled feature. It was never given a date, and after the retraction it does not have a settled direction either. Anything written about Workshop support before August 25, 2026, including in Post-Launch Roadmap, describes a plan that has since been pulled back for reconsideration.
The practical advice for players is unchanged from July: the studio does not support mods, running them is at your own risk, and manual save backups are worth keeping.
Update History for the patch sequence and the July mods and save-files notice in its original context.
Post-Launch Roadmap for the content Hound13 has committed to next.
Co-Op for how multiplayer actually works in the shipped build.
Buy-to-Play Model for the monetisation policy the mod question sits inside.
