Top mods - Neverwinter Nights

Setting up

The first thing to get is the latest version of the game. This is easily done as, despite the game being released four years ago, the auto-patcher still works and will bring you up to the current version 1.67 (as of 26th April this year, didn't we say this game was well supported?). Once you're suitably patched up it's time to start shopping around for the hak packs you'll need to run the various modules.

In the bad old days, hak packs roamed the internet like lost lambs, or were wedged almost indiscriminately into vast libraries, with little rhyme or reason. However after some ruthlessly effective trawling through the archives, some tweaking, some consolidation and hours of painstaking work these rogue hak packs have been rounded up into the CEP, or Community Expansion Pack, which is available right here. This unified package of hak packs has become the standard for most module builders and with it installed you should be able to run most of the modules you'll find.

It is a testament to how hard these modders work that there is already a patch for the CEP to make it compatible with the 1.67 version of the game. With a few hundred megabytes of content including everything from thousands more objects to wolf and spider riders and cannon the CEP is pretty definitive and provides most of what you'll need to run the majority of single player modules.

You've got your game installed, you've got the latest version and you've got the standard bunch of hak files. The first place to look for a new challenge is the Neverwinter Nights Vault and their master module list. With a staggering library of nearly four thousand player created modules to be browsed at leisure there is almost a life's work of playing time to be had out of this site. It should be noted that despite the CEP being the standard hak pack bundle used by most module creators, there are still hak packs out there which are in regular use and which might be required for a module. This is not a problem, however, as the page design of the Vault site links you to downloads for any required hak packs as well as the download for the module itself.

The downside of the continued support that Bioware have lavished on Neverwinter Nights is that you can expect some problems running some of the older modules and haks on the latest version of the game. This can limit the selection of available modules to (only?) a few thousand.