How to polish up Mount & Blade: Warband

Whether you’re new to developer Taleworlds’ Mount & Blade medieval combat franchise, or you’ve been in on it since the first beta releases way back when, there’s a good chance you want to know how you can tweak their second release, Mount & Blade: Warband. From new maps to new units to sweeping total conversions, the faithful have been churning out updates for Mount & Blade by the score,  and we’re going to take a look at how to get Warband to run one of the best-loved graphical overhauls around.

When the original Mount & Blade was released, one of the biggest criticisms levelled at it was its… shall we kindly say limited visuals? They did the job, naturally, and coming from a tiny independent developer it seemed pretty ungrateful to bitch about it, but the fact remains it wasn’t the prettiest game around. One of the most notable modifications Taleworlds’ industrious fanbase came up with appeared fairly late in the game’s lifespan; modder Gutekfiutek, already well known among the community for his Polished Buildings addon, decided to terraform the kingdom of Calradia a little. His Polished Landscapes mod astounded people the length and breadth of the internet – as long as you didn’t mind everywhere looking like some deserted stretch of Scandinavian wilderness, the game became a thing of absolute beauty.

With Warband out for some time now, and no equivalent hack for the more recent game turning up, let’s take a look at how well we can get it to run the mod.

Please note! At the time of writing Polished Landscapes does not work perfectly with Mount & Blade: Warband. Gutekfiutek freely admitted it was only the product of a few days’ coding, and he doesn’t seem too interested in continuing to develop it (as is his prerogative, obviously). Polished Landscapes doesn’t work flawlessly with the original version of the game, let alone Warband, with units able to pass through trees among other niggling errors. We’re offering this guide for those people who want Warband to look like this and aren’t too bothered the mod’s, well, not quite finished. It’s not just me, right? Right?

Anyway. Perhaps the biggest aesthetic problem with Warband is, because the original Mount & Blade lacks the new Sarranid kingdom, the Polished Landscapes mod can’t display sand correctly. It renders desert landscapes with extra bits of snow all over them, on the world, city and battle maps, as if they were subarctic tundra. Some players also report errors with meshes for multiplayer maps when using the mod, with men and horses riding up in the air as if they were climbing invisible boxes. Install at your own risk, obviously!

Before you do anything else, back up your Mount & Blade: Warband directory! This should be second nature anyway if you’re modding the game extensively. You can copy the entire directory for a clean install and paste it somewhere else on your hard drive – if a mod goes horribly, horribly wrong, you can always just delete the modded installation and copy the clean one back in its place. (You may even want to keep copies of the installation when a mod’s started up without any problems, just in case.)

Right, then; let’s take it slow and steady. Time for the instructions!

The file you should have downloaded (the link’s at the end of this post) is PL_Test_version.rar. Ignore the readme in there; it doesn’t apply to Warband. You can’t install the mod the way you normally would – you can’t play it as a separate version of the game. Your only option is to overwrite the relevant files for the Native (i.e. original) version.

Extract the .rar file. This should give you a folder called PL_Test_version.

• First of all, you want to open that folder up to get to the following directory -

(Your hard drive, wherever you just extracted the .rar file)\PL_Test_version\Modules\PL_test\Resource

• Copy all the files in that directory that end with .brf and paste them into the following directory inside where Mount & Blade: Warband was installed on your hard drive -

(Your hard drive)\mountblade warband\Modules\Native\Resource

(I have the Steam version and my hard drive is labelled C:\, so the directory I want is
C:\Program Files (x86)\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\mountblade warband\Modules\Native\Resource)

• Second, you want to get to this directory -

(Your hard drive)\PL_Test_version\Modules\PL_test\Textures

• Copy all the files in that directory that end with .dds and paste them into the following directory inside where Mount & Blade: Warband was installed on your hard drive -

(Your hard drive)\mountblade warband\Modules\Native\Textures

(I have the Steam version, so the directory I want is
C:\Program Files (x86)\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\mountblade warband\Modules\Native\Textures)

• Third, we have to change several lines in the file module.ini inside the following directory -

(Your hard drive)\mountblade warband\Modules\Native

• Open this file in a text editor. There are several lines further down that start with load_resource, ten of which you need to change to read load_mod_resource

(DO NOT copy any other files from the PL_Test_version folder. This will probably cause your game to crash out in the middle of loading. And make sure you’ve changed all ten lines in module.ini correctly – and only those ten – if you end up with bizarre graphical errors, this is very likely the reason.)

• Find the following lines and change them like so (from the left -> the right) -

load_resource = map_tree_meshes -> load_mod_resource = map_tree_meshes
load_resource = tree_meshes -> load_mod_resource = tree_meshes
load_resource = xtree_meshes -> load_mod_resource = xtree_meshes
load_resource = grass_meshes -> load_mod_resource = grass_meshes
load_resource = plant_meshes -> load_mod_resource = plant_meshes
load_resource = xtree_meshes_b -> load_mod_resource = xtree_meshes_b
load_resource = terrain_borders -> load_mod_resource = terrain_borders
load_resource = tree_e_meshes -> load_mod_resource = tree_e_meshes
load_resource = xtree_meshes_c -> load_mod_resource = xtree_meshes_c
load_resource = grass_meshes_b -> load_mod_resource = grass_meshes_b

• Lastly, you need to find the line in module.ini which starts with scan_module_textures and make sure it reads

scan_module_textures = 1

Cross your fingers, start Warband and pray!

If you run into difficulties, feel free to shout out, though we’re not the font of all knowledge – you may be better off searching the Taleworlds forum here. Play nice!

You can get the test release (the only existing version) of Gutekfiutek’s Polished Landscapes mod from the Taleworlds forum thread here.

This guide is basically adapted from user F33bs’ post on the Taleworlds forum here, so original credit goes to him or her.