Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga Divinity 2: Developer's Cut tools

Hello everyone!
I’ve been poking around the Divinity 2 Developer’s Cut and working on a few modding tools. It’s an old game, so I don’t expect a huge amount of interest, but maybe someone will still find them useful.

For now, I’ve released early versions of two tools: a Texture Viewer for browsing and exporting supported textures from DV2 archives, and a DKS Patch Builder for compiling edited textures into a separate DKS_Patch.dv2. The current workflow supports BC1/BC3 texture editing through exported PNG packages while leaving the original game archives untouched. These are still early releases, so feedback and bug reports are welcome.

If you’re interested, you can check the GitHub repositories below, where you’ll find both the source code and portable binaries for easier use:

Texture Viewer: https://github.com/PmNz8/divinity2-texture-viewer
DKS Patch Builder: https://github.com/PmNz8/divinity2-dks-patch-builder

I’m working on other tools as well, but they are still in the research/experimental stage. These two already provide a basic but complete texture-modding workflow.

I hope it’s okay to make another post right after my previous one

It is now possible to create new quests in Divinity 2. Well... almost. I’ve released the first version of a sample quest-authoring workflow together with some reverse-engineering documentation of Divinity 2’s scripting and quest systems:

https://github.com/PmNz8/divinity2-quest-author

The research is already further along than what is currently available on GitHub. It is possible to work with quest items, spawn and remove them from the world, create multiple possible endings, add quest rewards, and more. I also have a tool for injecting a new quest into an existing save from different points in the story, although it has not yet been proven to work universally. For now new quests require fresh start.

The engine requires quests to be pre-registered in the default save file. The game ships with initial saves that already contain these registrations, which are used when starting Ego Draconis or Flames of Vengeance. The tool injects the new quest into the starting saves and uses the DKS_Patch override priority to avoid touching any game files.

Oh hi! I thought I was the only one who is still interested in this game and everything inside, such as textures, models, scripts... but wow, the fact that you are doing is curious and I would like to observe your progress in this process... or maybe even help. I swear, just today I thought of getting into the depths of Divinity scripts to find something that no one got to in the game itself. And since childhood I dreamed of creating a huge mod with a large plot, as a continuation of the game or an DLC lol

Hello @Shirochka thank you for your message. Just today on the Larian discord other user shared that 2 days ago some other person published this tools: https://github.com/ygalsk/dv2-mod

this is much more advanced in-game quest editor than my attempt at quest modding (but it is dependent on external Original Sin osiris library that my version does not need). So for now I will not focus on the quest part because it makes no sense to duplicate effort and do the same thing over again. If I knew this tool existed 2 days ago I would not put work into the quest author.

But anyway. I am focusing on the asset pipeline for now so everything about importing/exporting and making it possible to edit game asset.
My first shot was the texture viewer. I updated it today to support batch export so no need to click 100 times to extract all the images in PNG. Also the DKS Patch builder now suport batch insertion and MIP level generation. So it is enough to modify the texture MIP0 level (highest quality) and all the lower levels will be generated automatically during import (again - less work for modders).

I am not a modder myself, I lack the creativity to come up with stories and quest but I like to poke around various things and I saw that Divinit 2 has some obscure software that allow you do <do something> but not in an easy and convenient way. So this was my motivation to spend some time on this. Even if one person will find it useful that is enough.

Oh, that’s interesting!! I’m Surprised you found another quest editor, because I was mostly curious about the technical side of all this anyway. But let him do his project, the main thing is not to stop at your project

The asset pipeline sounds especially interesting to me. I’ve mostly only extracted models and textures from the game and looked at them in NifSkope and Blender, but I’ve never really worked with the game’s scripts or internal asset pipeline. I’d honestly love to learn how all of this works

And I totally understand what you mean about not being a modder yourself. I’m actually the opposite in that regard.. I’ve had ideas for a huge story-driven Divinity II mod since I was a kid, but I have almost zero programming experience. So I guess I have the creativity and you have the technical archaeology skills lol

If you ever need someone to test tools, poke around the game, extract/check assets, or just experiment with things, I’d be very happy to help. I’m genuinely interested in seeing how far this can go^^

Are you good at blender use? Because I have done some work regarding that. Another tools.

This tool: https://github.com/PmNz8/divinity2-model-viewer
Browse and preview supported Divinity II models, CAT/ITEM containers, textures, skeletons and animations, then export visual .d2model packages for Blender. It does not handle collision data, discover every runtime texture dependency, or support every asset layout.

This is blender plugin: https://github.com/PmNz8/divinity2-blender-addon
Import .d2model packages, edit supported geometry, UVs, materials, textures, existing LODs and animation keys, then export changes for DKS Patch Builder. It does not support collision editing, creating CAT/ITEM containers from scratch, unrestricted skinned topology or skeleton changes, or normal-map pixel export for CAT models.

The asset pipeline is tricky. For example, the player dragon’s .cat container contains its own mesh, whose material explicitly references an external diffuse (DM) texture. It has no explicit normal-map (NM) or specular/gloss (SM) binding in the material slots we inspected, yet the game uses an external NM through an unresolved mechanism; SM selection remains unconfirmed. Geometry changes must target the mesh embedded in CAT, while DM and NM edits target their separate texture NIF files. In our player-dragon tests, neither embedding NM pixels inside CAT nor adding explicit links to alternative external normal maps produced any visible effect; replacing the original external NM texture did.

The exporter and DKS Patch Builder preserve the recorded resource ownership and texture associations, so supported edits are applied to the appropriate files. However, not all runtime dependencies and edge cases are understood. Assets can also share textures, so editing a texture exported with one .item may affect other objects in the game.
A possible next step would be to support importing modified assets as separate resources, with their own texture copies and updated references, so the changes remain isolated to the new asset. This would also require resolving how CAT assets select textures that are not explicitly linked, and ensuring the game actually uses the new asset.