Heh, that's interesting you think the game has so dramatically improved over the previous builds. Don't get me wrong, the game is quite fun as it is, but I still think the armor system is fundamentally problematic when combined with hard cc.
You want to mod something for the previous game? I would discourage that if you're hoping for much traction in people playing it, or even if you want much help from other modders. 99% of people will move on to the next game, which hopefully will be much easier to mod.
The editor did end up being fairly reliable though. Rarely crashed unless you screwed up some code really bad. Map making became MUCH more reliable than when the editor was first released, when it crashed and got corrupted all the time. It's still very difficult and time-consuming to make something good looking though. And that's one area that DOS2 will be vastly superior than the first game, with many more higher quality assets and hopefully some major quality of life improvements like undo on terrain changes.
You could practice making a map in the first game, since it probably will still be fairly similar in the next, but I wouldn't go to all the effort of making a whole standalone mod.
