Customisation of original Dragon age armor
Author: Kinlochhold
Adding Items from mods to vanilla NPCs (A kh fast-and-dirty mini-tutorial) In reponse to a query on DA Nexus regarding how to equip Ser Cauthrien with the Saskia armour from The Witcher 2 DAO mod, I wrote this mini-tutorial. I may expand it and add images to illustrate the steps at some point, but for anyone conversant with the toolset, this should be clear enough, as is.
1 - Always work in new module and never ever directly edit anything in the Single Player module. Ever. It can break an install. Creating a new module and adding the Single Player assets only takes a moment. (And there are tutorials a-plenty on how to do that, so I’ll skip right to the meaty bits, using Ostagar!Cauthrien as my example.)
2 - If I wanted to alter her equipment to use something different from the base game, I’d open her UTC with the “Open Local Copy” dialogue, make the changes, and then export the revised UTC. That won’t work for an item added by a mod, though. So instead, I’ll just export a copy of the pre100cr_sercauthrien.utc: Export — > Export without dependent resources
3 - Next, locate the exported UTC. In my case, it is in the :\My Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\modules\Single Player\override\toolsetexport folder. You can move it out of that folder. (I put it on my desktop so it’s easy to work with.) Open the UTC with the toolset. (Drag-and-drop works.) Now you have editable text fields.
4 - You’ll need to know the UTI codes for each of the modded items you want her to equip. In this case, the easiest way to find that out is to extract a copy of the ERF containing the data from the dazip, and then drag-and-drop the ERF into the toolset. From the list of files I can see that I want w2dao_saskia_armor.uti, w2dao_saskia_boots.uti, and w2dao_saskia_gloves.uti.
5 - Back to the UTC file. Expand the Equip_ItemsList field. This is the stuff she’s wearing and carrying, including her weapons. It’s usually easy to figure out what items are what… It is really important to make sure that you replace a chestpiece with another chest, gloves with gloves, boots with boots… fortunately, the vanilla armour items are name coded (cht is the chest, bot, the boots, glv, gloves), and in this instance, so are the modded items. Yay! Doubleclick on the field you want to edit, and change the data to the modded item, making field-appropriate substitution: Saskia’s Armor (w2dao_saskia_armor) for the chest of her Heavy Chainmail (gen_im_arm_cht_hvy_hch) , etc. (The .uti suffix isn’t needed, just the item code.) After editing all three fields, I can save the exported and (now edited) UTC.
6 - Drop the new UTC into override. If Ostagar hasn’t been entered yet, she should be wearing Saskia’s armor, (Note that the edited UTC won’t affect the gear in a pre-rendered cutscene.) And if you want the same equipment change for her other appearances, similarly edit the UTC files for both Landsmeet!Cauthrien, and epilogue!Cauthrien.