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Welcome to the Legendary Explorer wiki!

If you're a mod developer and want to write a tutorial on how to do something modding related with Legendary Explorer, feel free to make pages on this wiki and link to them on the ME3Tweaks Discord's #resources channel. Looking for ME3Tweaks Mod Manager's documentation? Click here.

Getting Started

• Legendary Edition Modding: Getting Started

File & Data format

• Textures in the Mass Effect Trilogy
• Mass Effect 2 Coalesced.ini file format
• Mass Effect Legendary Edition package file format

Toolset

You can download stable releases of the toolset from the Releases tab, or you can download stable and nightly releases with ME3Tweaks Mod Manager. You can also build the toolset from source.

Core Editors

• Package Editor. Basics
• Dialogue Editor. Overview of the Dialogue Editor
• FaceFX Principles of Facial Animation in ME3/LE3
• Unrealscript in LegendaryExplorer

Utilities

• Asset Database. Quickly find assets
• Package Dumper. Find very specific usages of things
• Misc. Debugging the Mass Effect Trilogy

Tutorials

All games

• [easy] Creating Bink Movies for the Mass Effect Trilogy (RAD Tools, Bink 2 for Unreal)
• [intermediate] Intro to Plot Management (Package Editor, Conditionals Editor, Plot Editor)
• [intermediate] How to get your meshes setup for import into a PCC (Blender, UDK 2015)
• [intermediate] A guide for Multiple Material Meshes (Blender, Package Editor, Mesh Explorer, Trilogy Save Editor)
• [intermediate] Mounts, Patching, Moddesc oh my (DLC Mod Starter Kit Generator, Mount Editor, ME3 Tweaks Mod Manager Nexusmods File Search, Moddesc.ini Editor)
• [advanced] A guide to editing Character Meshes (Asset Database, Package Editor, Mesh Explorer, TFC Compactor, ASI Manager Streaming Levels HUD, GIMP) - shows Game 2 and 3 but parts will apply to 1 as well
• [advanced] Adding your outfit armour for Shepard as a new asset (Package Editor, Mesh Explorer) - Game 2 and Game 3 only
• [easy-advanced] munchyfly's Small Video Tutorials (Legendary Edition Only) (Package Editor, DLC Mod Starter Kit Generator, Text Editor, Blender, Image Editing Software)
• [intermediate] MaxisMatch Hair to Mass Effect LE Tutorial

ME1 & LE1

• [intermediate] How to port a hairstyle from The Sims 4
• [intermediate] Modifying 2DA tables via a DLC mod (Package Editor)
• [intermediate] Editing LE1 Audio with ISACT
• [advanced] Creating ME1 DLC mods with custom textures (Not applicable to LE1)

ME2 & LE2

• [easy] Adding powers to ME2 Shepard (Package Editor, Coalesced and in-game console)
• [easy] How to make your LE2 Coal Edits into the more compatible DLC Mods (Coalesced)
• [intermediate] Let's Make a Mod: Sequence Editing Examples (Sequence Editor)
• [advanced] Creating Startup Files and Adding Custom Conditionals for ME2 Mods (Package Editor)

ME3 & LE3

• [easy] Adding Helmets Back To Cutscenes That Remove Them (Package Editor)
• [easy] How To Change Hair, Eye, and Skin Color for NPCS (Package Editor)
• [easy] Make a new email (Coalesced and TLK Editor)
• [easy] How to make your LE3 Coal Edits into the more compatible DLC Mods (Coalesced)
• [intermediate] Mass Effect 3 Camera Modding: From Noob to Not So Noob (Package Editor, Interp Editor)
• [intermediate] Adding your assets to the Store (Package Editor, Coalesced, ME3Tweaks Mod Manager)
• [advanced] Adding Hair to the Character Creator (Package Editor, Mesh Explorer)
• [advanced] Adding a Datapad and Message
• [advanced] Redirecting, Replacing and Adding Audio to Conversations (Package Editor, Sound Explorer, Dialogue Editor)
• [advanced] How to add new outfits for Squad Mates in LE3 & ME3 (Package Editor, DLC Mod Starter Kit Generator, Text Editor)

Legendary Explorer Core

Legendary Explorer Core is a .NET library developed by ME3Tweaks that can modify Unreal Engine 3 package files used in the Mass Effect games. This library is used in many different tools, such as Legendary Explorer, ME3Tweaks Mod Manager, and ALOT Installer. If you are interested in writing code to automate a modding process, LEC can provide you with the functionality to modify package files and parse most formats.

LEC Nightly Documentation - Updated on every commit to Beta

WIP

• LE2/LE2 - Authoring audio with Wwise
• ME3 - Changing armor on characters with an existing asset
• LE3 - Poses and Gestures
• All games - Scaleform Editing: File Format Basics (Porting from ME3Tweaks.com)

Outdated

• FaceFX - old tutorial resource, still useful for text and screenshots - This info is also covered in detail in the tutorial video, see the new article.