Total War: Three Kingdoms is dead, long live Total War: Three Kingdoms mods. These have always been a huge part of experience playing Total War games and with every new release that pioneering community has only grown larger. We’re now seeing modders doing more than ever, filling in all the gaps and creating content that Creative Assembly may never get around to adding themselves across both fantasy and historical.

Three Kingdoms is a great entry in historical Total War – as you can tell from our Total War: Three Kingdoms review. Covering a popular historical period, especially for the Chinese gaming community, has naturally resulted in there being a lot of mods. At the time of writing at least there are over 2,500 user creations.

These not only add elements to make characters even more distinctive, but also offer a touch of individuality to players, which feels very at home in a historical period, which at its heart, is about heroes. Unless otherwise stated, all mods should be compatible up to the latest version and all expansions, but let us know if we’ve missed anything.

These are are the best Total War: Three Kingdoms mods:

Let’s check out what the modders have in store…

It wouldn’t be a Total War mod scene without a Radious mod, and the renowned group have turned their attention to Total War: Three Kingdoms. This overhaul mod has everything from new units, to new campaign mechanics, better battle balance, scripting, new lore… you name it, they’ve swept their brush over it.

The Three Kingdom’s period was filled with famous individuals, and to reflect this, there is a record of almost every named character in the game. But it can often be hard to appreciate their individuality when most of the characters use the same few repeated portraits. Make Them Unique is a mod that fixes this, creating new unique heroes alongside absolutely gorgeous artwork.

Since Mandate of Heaven and A World Betrayed, tonnes of characters from the setting have been brought to life with unique portraits and items. But that still leaves many, many more who still deserve them. Wu Kingdaissance is a mod which essentially reskins all the major characters in Three Kingdoms, giving them new weapons, armour, ancillaries, models, mounts, and abilities.

A recent criticism by many long time historical strategy fans has been based around Total War battles becoming ever shorter and more ‘arcade-like’. Whether you believe that or not, Beneath A Red Sky is a battle mod which attempts to capture a slower tactical battle experience, as the author says, more in line with “What you would expect from an ancient battle”.

This is a new quality of life mod that’s come out of the Chinese community, and as such is in Chinese languages by default. There is however translation add-ons available for English, Vietnamese & Korean. Otherwise, All Factions Playable does exactly what it says on the tin – it makes every faction playable across all start dates.

After playing Three Kingdoms for awhile, units can begin to look a little samey. It’s not necessarily the difference between the units themselves, but more the ornamentation of individuals within those units. Vanilla Units Remaster by Deema is a mod which seeks to make units “look better while still maintaining their original feel and historical authenticity”.

In Three Kingdoms, each faction has a special unit they can recruit, and the unique heroes belonging to that faction are the ones with that ability. But when another faction gains that hero, they lose the ability to recruit their previous factions unique unit. Recruited unique character can use their special units, is a mod which ties that faction unit recruitment to a skill, meaning that even if you recruit them into your faction, they will still have access to that special unit — a way of further emphasizing their individuality as a hero character.

We’ve all been there. After turns and turns currying favour with a faction, you finally confederate them, getting that hero character you’ve had your eyes on for the past 20 turns. But lo and behold, despite them being an outstanding warrior, the AI has for some reason decided to upgrade them as an administrator instead.

This is an interesting one. All it actually does is input a text input panel into the game interface. If you put in the right command however, it will instantly run a script that will affect instantaneous change. It’s a dev-tool, essentially, that allows you to bend the game to your whims at any given moment.

Adjusting the amount of turns that comprise an in-game ‘calendar’ year is not a new concept, and we’re not surprised to see one released for Three Kingdoms. As there are five seasons in 3K, this mod effectively doubles the length of a year by making each season spread across two turns. There is also a 15 turns per year variant, if you’re completely mad.

I can only speak for the English language mods (Three Kingdoms has an extremely prevalent Chinese modding community) but SFO’s Three Kingdoms mod is the most significant. Three Dragons is a mod which, in the words of its creators “changes every aspect of TW:3K to be more interesting and challenging”. These changes include reworked battles, UI, units, terrain effects, heroes, literally everything you can think of.