Empire Total War is known to be difficult when it comes to mods; after all, it wasn't made with the intention of having it modded in the first place. In recent years, one of the most common issues related to ETW mods is how the game does not detect newly installed mods or still detects elements of past mods you have deleted.

The reason is quite simple: there's a text file (a script) that is not being updated whenever you install or delete your mods (".pack" files), which can not only cause the issue above but can also cause crashes. There were and maybe still are some mod launchers out there that automatically update the script, but many of them, if not all of them, are not supported anymore and could cause more issues than they are supposed to solve.

The best thing is to do it yourself, and this guide will tell you everything you need to know to never experience a crash related to a mod that is either not there anymore or not detected, or your ETW game to launch as the vanilla game when it should be launched as a modded version.

1. You need a clean install. It means you need to delete everything in these 2 locations :
  • "Steam\steamapps\common\Empire Total War"
  • "AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Empire"

2. Download your desired mod which should be one or more ".pack" files.

3. Put these ".pack" files in your ETW data folder here :
  • "Steam\steamapps\common\Empire Total War\data"

4. Now you need to create or update the text file titled "user.empire_script" here :
  • "AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Empire\scripts"

5. Inside this text file, you just need to list the names of the ".pack" files you want to use. Here's an example using 4 ".pack" files from Durango's mod :


6. Once you update the text file, save it and you are ready to go. Whenever you add or delete a ".pack" file in your ETW data folder, you must update the script otherwise it can cause crashes or it will simply not detect your newly installed mod.

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