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The Step Wiki is a community-maintained wiki hosting mod-build guides (aka, "Game Guides"), modding-tool guides and a wealth of additional modding resources as well as community-generated content. Please take a moment to read our Community Citizenship Guide.
Official Mod-Build Guides
Forthcoming Mod-Build Guides (Release date TBD)
Pending Mod-Build Guides (curators needed)
What Is Step Modifications?
Step provides detailed instructions about creating modded builds of our favorite moddable games. Additionally, we provide a mod-guild guide framework (see below) and our Mod Stewardship Service for safekeeping and/or ongoing maintenance of otherwise 'retired' mods.
Over the past 20+ years, people have been creating and using custom game modifications. This is a great way to extend a game and increase its replay value. The problem is that the outcomes of installing a bunch of mods to change a game is a bit of a risk, because it's tough to understand all of what a particular mod does within the context of the game. It's also very tough to understand how various mods interact or conflict with one another. Step Modifications serves to erase these problems and provide the tools and resources needed to understand how to discover, understand, and resolve them.
Information about modding can be hard to consume and rationalize, because it's often fragmented and scattered across multiple forums, blogs, wikis, and chatrooms. Step consolidates relevant information about modding the games we support and the tools we recommend to do so. This information is presented in the form of a structured, step-by-step guide. All Step guides rely on the System Setup Guide (SSG) to establish a clean modding environment, a tried-and-true 'best' practice to avoid otherwise common problems on the path to completing the "mod build" in order to get down to playing the game. Official Step builds are well tested and stable, yielding both a visually and play enhanced result that doesn't deviate from the original game concepts. Step builds are also modular and extensible as a foundation for more customization using our mod-build guide framework (see below). Other websites offer resources for creating and maintaining "mod lists". Step also inherently provides comprehensive and modular mod lists as a fundamental component of our framework, but more importantly, we provide the extensible context to successfully create a mod list and a procedural guide around it.
Mod-Build Guide Support
We offer support on this website for all games listed at right. While we do not yet have mod-build guides (aka, "Game Guides") for some of these games, the site infrastructure now supports all of them, and we can easily build support for additional games of interest to the community (see Nexus Mods for ideas).
In addition to our official modding guides, Step Modifications now supports custom guide creation using our mod-build guide framework. One of our main objectives is providing relevant mod-build guides for "moddable" games, as determined by the modding community (see games we support). In order to do this, Step needs individuals who have expertise modding said games. Guide creation and maintenance is a big, yet rewarding endeavor... this is why we're still doing it. Our staff's expertise is primarily with Bethesda RPGs, but the same principles apply to all games. Regardless, each guide must be curated by an experienced modder of the game, thus taking up the role of Curator. Guide curation isn't such a big endeavor when 2-3 people spend a few hours per week creating, maintaining, and supporting one or more guides in their wheelhouse.
Those interested in either joining our team or remaining in the shadows strictly as guide curators are most welcome! We could also use help updating our deprecated guides, so please visit the Step Wiki User Guide to learn more.
Donations
Step Modifications is a non-profit sustained by community donations of both time and dollars. Our resources are provided completely free of charge and without any advertisements. If you enjoy the platform and find the content useful, please consider donating or volunteering to assist with site and content maintenance. Again, no donations are required to use this platform, and all monetary donations are applied towards site operating expenses.
