Originally posted by Frankie
Hi I have not played BG for about a year, but I have Bg1 + Tales and BG2 + TOB. But, I keep hearing happy hollers about how the User created Mods are the bomb.
I checked a lot of the mod sites and it seems like there are a bunch of them and I am not sure which ones to install and what order to install them in.
I would like to install AS MUCH new materail as possible - any strange plot twists / wierd charaters / and new items are welcome.
So my question is what mods / add ons should / can I insatll and in what order? 
Thanks in advance
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EDIT: I am putting this edit at the top of my post because I provided you with some links below to download some mod files but most of these files are linked to FilePlanet. What this means is that you might have to wait for about 2 to 3 hours to *start* downloading a 600 MB mod file since you have to get in a queue to download stuff with FilePlanet (when I tried to download these files from FilePlanet 2 days ago, my waiting times to start downloading were about 160 to 170 minutes). FORTUNATELY, there is another place where you can download ALL the files you will need and you don't have to wait in line to download them. Simply go to
http://iegmc.mirror.intermedia.com.sg/ and you will see subdirectories here for each mod you need (I already linked to one of these subdirectories below for the NeverEndingJourney mod.
END OF EDIT
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For the biggest amount of material, you should try out the Big Picture mod. It combines the HUGE mods or Darkest Day, Shadows Over Soubar, Tortured Souls and some others. In this respect, the Big Picture mod will probably be *the mod* you'll want to try out but there is a little problem.
The people that created the Big Picture mod seem to consider documentation as the anti-Christ of modding. If you go to their webpage which is:
http://www.plaguezone.com/
, you will see that there is a home page, a files section, a chat section, links to 2 forums and another links section.
Now, first of all, the only thing you will see on the home page is the info that the Big Picture mod combines several mods. Sounds nice. It also tells you that you need to already have the mods that are going to be combined before you can use the Big Picture mod. Unfortunately, neither the files page or the links page contains the or provides links to these mods that are going to be combined. As a result, your first task will be to actually *locate* the mods listed with the description of the Big Picture mod I talked about above, namely:
1-The Darkest Day:
http://tdd.teambg.net/
2- Shadows Over Soubar:
http://www.teambg.net/soubar/
3- Tortured Souls:
http://torturedsouls.teambg.net/
As a note, download the patches for the mods above as well otherwise Big Picture won't work. You want these patches:
1- TDD103-to-103A-patch.exe for The Darkest Day.
2- Soubar101patch.exe for Shadows Over Soubar.
3- a.) TSv503.zip
b.) TSv504.zip
c.) TSv505.zip
for Tortured Souls. Note that you need ALL these patches here. Just getting TSv505.zip will not suffice.
OK, now that you have the mods and their patches above, it's time to download the Big Picture mod. So, we go to
http://www.plaguezone.com/ again and click on the files section link.
The files section link here lists a bunch of files, all of them equally cryptic. Which one do we want? The one at the top sounds like what we want as it says that it is the newest version of the full Big Picture mod. This is what I am using right now but this is *not* what you will be wanting because you have Baldur's Gate I and Tales of the Sword Coast. OK, so which one do you want then? Looking down the list, we first see 2 things under "quick patches" and then something called "BP-NEJ beta 1.2". If you are like me, your first thought will be: What the **** is this thing??? Well, spending about half an hour on the forums finally reveals what this is. It is yet another mod that you can use with Big Picture and it is called Never Ending Journey, or simply "NeJ". You don't want to download this file either though, because like the very first file, it is for people that do not have Baldur's Gate I.
OK, the next thing on the list is something called "HOT NEW RELEASE--BP-BGT!!!!" WOW, cool eh? Wait a minute though. First of all, what the heck is this thing and how is it different than the first file on this page which I told you not to download? Once again, scouring the forums like a madman will finally reveal (after all your patience is exhausted and your fury boils to a point where you could bring down the roof) that this is something called Baldur's Gate Trilogy version and that's what the BGT stands for in BP-BGT. Aaaaaaah, so this is also the Big Picture mod but a special version of it. As it so happens, the regular Big Picture mod is designed for people that only have Baldur's Gate II and the BGT version of Big Picture mod is designed for people that have both Baldur's Gate I and II, allowing you to play Baldur's Gate I, II and Throne of Bhaal consecutively, hence creating a trilogy. In other words, BP-BGT will add content to Baldur's Gate I but regular BP will not.
NOTE: I had to spend so much time on the forums to find all this info because unlike on Forgotten Wars forums (among others), there are no pinned "mod info" threads on TeamBG or Plaguezone forums. The only pinned threads that you can see in each mod's respective forum is for bug reports which, needless to say, doesn't help a bit for someone who doesn't know what these mods and acyronims are. You have to go through a bunch of unrelated posts to be able to get to this information.
Anyhow, now that you have the BGT version of the Big Picture mod, we should get Never Ending Journey. Remember, we didn't get the "BP-NeJv12.rar" file because this was for the regular BP mod and not BP-BGT but more importantly, it was not the mod itself but actually only a patch for it.
So the question is now this: Where does one find the actual Never Ending Journey mod? Well, among all the other files you will need, you can find it here:
http://iegmc.mirror.intermedia.com.sg/nej/
Interestingly, in the directory I listed above, there are 2 versions of the Never Ending Journey mod. Quite fortunately, the modders here break their rules and actually provide us with a readme file (OH MY GOD!) where it tells us that what we want is NeverEndingJourney-weiduv13i.rar. OK, so get this file.
Now, we once again go back to the files section of
http://www.plaguezone.com/ and get the BP-BGT patch of NeverEndingJourney which is:
http://plaguezone.com/BigPicture/BP-BGT ... TCH312.zip
OK, now what we need to do is to click on the big BP-BGT file we had download earlier and extract it to our Baldur's Gate II folder. When this happens, we will hopefully end up with 2 readme files, one labeled Automated Install and one labeled Manual install. I suggest that you read both because the manual install file includes some important information that the automated install file does not, such as installing some small additonal mods after installing all the big mods we downloaded so far.
If you are going to use the Automated Install, make sure to follow the instructions on the readme file **TO THE LETTER**. A single mistake will cost you a complete re-install. CHECK ALL THE FILE NAMES ON THIS README FILE TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU HAVE THE RIGHT FILES IN THE RIGHT PLACES. This is crucial. For instance, the file you downloaded for Tortured Souls might be called "tsv501.zip" but the readme file tells you to use the "tsv50.exe" file and not the "tsv501.zip" file. What this means is that you have to open the "tsv501.zip" file and then extract the "tsv50.exe" file from it and place this file in the required directory. If you simply place the "tsv501.zip" file in the directory instead, the installer will not be able to find the Tortured Souls mod and your install will be hosed.
In my case, I didn't have Baldur's Gate I installed and therefore didn't use the BP-BGT version but the regular version instead. As a result, I had to install the NeverEndingJourney mod after using the Automated Installer manually and there was no documentation for it anywhere. Since you will be using the BGT version however, I think you will have an easier time with installing NeverEndingJourney (the Automated Installer might take care of it).
If you have questions, feel freel to ask. The Big Picture mod can be very frustrating to install because of the lack of documentation but it is quite fun to play once you get it up and running.
