Modding:Hotloading

What is hotloading in BG3 Modding?

Hotloading is a way to greatly speed up your modding workflow by reducing the number of times you have to open and close the game. It can be very tedious to have to restart the entire game to test every time you make a change to your mod. With hotloading, you can leave the game open and still see your changes reflected live.

What can I use it for?

You can use hotloading for .GR2 aka mesh/model files. Say you are creating a custom head by editing one of the vanilla ones. You can hotload your custom head into the game, open Character Creator, and then swap to your custom head each time you export a new version from Blender to see what your changes look like in game. Very handy! All you have to do is make sure you swap away from your hotloaded asset and back to load any new changes.

How do I do it?

To hotload, you need to create a mirror of your mod’s files inside Baldur’s Gate 3’s Data files.