The Battle Brothers mod scene is modest, but has some wonderful gems worth exploring. The game itself was a shining light in terms of indie releases back in 2017. If you haven’t encountered it yet, it’s a turn-based strategy game where you are in charge of a mercenary company in a fictionalised setting loosely based on medieval Europe.
From humble origins, you have to travel the procedurally generated world taking job after job, gaining fame, money and growing your troop’s abilities. The campaign layer is dynamic and progresses around you. It’s also hard as nails at times, with one mishandled skirmish wiping out most of your best soldiers all in one go and forcing you to start all over again (or fail). Save scumming is common.
But like all good strategy games, eventually you feel the desire for new things to do. Battle Brother’s DLC output isn’t so prolific that you can bank on new official content, so we must turn to the modders to find those fresh angles to bring the game to life.
These are the best Battle Brothers mods:
Let’s explore them in more detail…
This is an overhaul mod that does a wide range of things, many of which can be found in other mods we’ve listed below. If you want an all-in-one sweep of the game though, the Legends mod seems to be the best in town right now.
This is a simple mod that seeks to help anyone who’s ever thought “I need more Bros”. Battle Brothers typically only allows you to have 12 ‘active’ members in your party, with up to nine additional mercenaries in reserve so you can chop and change as people get injured. Some origins now increase or decrease these base numbers, but for vanilla purposes you’re basically stuck with 12 bros at any one time.
This is essentially a collection of sub-mods brought together under the banner of “things that the game could do differently and things that it should do better.” It consists of a lot of limited-scope minor mods that do this this or that and you can download each part individually to suit your needs for a perfectly tailored experience.
The later DLCs for Battle Brothers have done some really interesting things with modifying the starting scenarios available to the player. Some of these don’t have as many long-term relevance as we’d like, but it certainly gives enough variety to get you over that early game hump.
The great thing about Battle Brothers’ living world is that, as time progresses all of the villages and towns get affected by the actions of the NPCs around them. These manifest as ‘Situations’ that you can get summaries off in the base game.
Named/Uber weapons become a thing in the late-game and this mod allows you to craft them in the Taxidermist. Crafting in this game is a little opaque, as you can’t see a ‘master’ list of craftable items to then go hunt down the materials for. Items only appear when you have the required items already.
One thing I always struggle with in the early game is making money and figuring out the best way to trade. This minor mod can help alleviate some of that by raising the base price of loot by 15%. So when you next find yourself awash with round shields and clubs that you don’t want, know that you can now get a bit more for them!
Unlike a lot of strategy games these days, Battle Brothers has never formally added Steam Workshop support. It’s possible the devs thought they wouldn’t really need to, as there was a time where they tried to stop working on the game and move on to other projects.
