U-King Mod Manager is a tool for managing and merging mods for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It should be considered a successor to BCML.
Because BOTW is a fun, high quality game with a powerful engine and a fairly robust content/engine distinction, it is in many ways the perfect game to mod. Unfortunately, since it was designed to work on underpowered consoles, particularly the Wii U, its ROM structure is designed more for maximum efficiency and performance than for extensibility. Features like the Resource Size Table and large archives to handle diverse content loaded in single batches are excellent as optimizations but make modding a more brittle and conflict-prone process. (For more information on the many kinds of mod conflicts that tend to be ubiquitous in BOTW using ordinary game assets, see this reference on ZeldaMods. There is also a post about this on GBAtemp which summarizes the problem fairly concisely.)
Since BOTW mods are prone to such problems, when using more than one, they must often be processed and merged together to ensure a stable, playable experience (and in many cases just to get the game to boot at all). UKMM offers a powerful, robust, and highly accurate merging process to ensure the most optimal result: a modpack that pretty much just works.
In contrast to BCML, UKMM also tried to provide a more generally satisfying mod management experience not just narrowly focused on successful merging, drawing inspiration in some ways from the famous Mod Organizer 2.
Unlike BCML, setup is pretty much just download and unzip. For more details consult the Book.
Unlike BCML, building from source is easy.
Requirements:
- Recent Rust toolchain (MSRV 1.80)
- A compiler that supports C++17
- Modern CMake (3.12+)
Nothing else special is required. Generate a release build by running cargo build --release in the root repo folder. It may take a while.
Issues: https://github.com/NiceneNerd/UKMM/issues
Contributions are always welcome. Some notes about the process:
- At present, some tests need to be setup manually, as they require you to have
a game dump and a Wii U mod to test on. However, all tests in the
uk-contentpackage are standalone and should be pass without any setup. - As this codebase grew is complicated ways over a period of a few years now, some parts might not be entirely consistent in conventions or could use refactoring. If you work on any part of the code that could use improvement in consistency or sustainability, please go ahead and do what seems right in your eyes.
This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The source is publicly available on GitHub.
