ME3Tweaks Mod Manager is a mod manager that supports all three Mass Effect trilogy games, as well as all three legendary versions of the games, plus the Legendary Edition launcher. This program is designed to make it easier to install mods for the Mass Effect series for end users. It has tools for developers, as well as advanced game diagnostic features that can be used to troubleshoot both the program itself and games.

ME3Tweaks Mod Manager is also known as M3.

How to install a mod

1. Make a game backup before you install any mods (in the Backup menu item)
2. Drag and drop your mod download onto the interface (or use Download with Manager feature on NexusMods)
3. Click Import to import the mod into the library (this allows update detection for opted-in mods and other features)
4. Select the mod and click Apply

You don't need to run the game through Mod Manager. But for Legendary Edition games, you can turn on the autoboot option in the settings to automatically boot the selected game when launching it from Mod Manager.

How to remove a mod or restore the game
If you made a game backup:

1. You can restore granularly (enable/disable/delete DLC mods, restore specific files) by clicking 'Manage Target'. Note that texture modded games will have limitations on restoration due to how texture modding modifies the game.
2. You can mirror your backup onto your game by using the Restore menu item at the top of the main window. This will make your game match your backup directory. 

Manually copying your game backup will likely result in Mod Manager not recognizing your game, as it has a 'cmm_vanilla' file that is used to force Mod Manager to reject it as a modding target.
If you didn't make a game backup:

1. Unfortunately your only option to reliably reset the game is to delete the entire game directory and redownload it from EA App or Steam or other online storefront. Repairing or uninstalling/reinstalling will not work as it does not remove extra files added by various mods.

Note that texture mods cannot be 'uninstalled', simply due to how the game engine works.

Mod installation order
Mods need to be installed in a specific order in order to properly work.

1. Content mods - Mod Manager installs nearly all of these.
2. Textures (installed with Mass Effect Modder, or Mod Manager's Batch Installer feature) - These must be installed after all content mods or the texture map will become desynced. You will find it is quite a hassle to reset everything if this step is done out of order. You can stack texture mods on top of each other, as long you only modify files through Mass Effect Modder, aka 'MEM'. Textures cannot be uninstalled once installed, your game will permanently be marked as texture modded until you restore your backup.

Content mods should NOT be installed after textures. Mod Manager will not allow install of mods after textures are installed on Original Trilogy versions of games due to empty mips. A lot of things will break if you do this. Doing so for Legendary Edition will put your game into an unsupported state.

Tools for mod developers
Mod Manager includes many tools for developers, accessible by turning on developer mode in the settings. This includes things like DLC mod Starter Kit, mod deployment to 7z (with a whole suite of mod checks), access to many developer tools right in the Tools menu, and more.


A note about LE1 Coalesced Files
Mod Manager 8.1 supports merging ConfigDelta files together to create a new Coalesced_INT.bin file for LE1. This has a side effect of disabling the ability to manually edit or replace the one used by the game. You can turn this feature off in the settings; however, you will break all mods that use this feature (of which there will be an increasing amount).

If you wish to use the changes from your Coalesced_INT.bin changes for LE1, you need to port the changes to the M3CD format, which is fairly simple to do.


Supported operating systems include:
- Windows 10
- Windows 11
- LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED

Older operating systems are NOT supported. If it works for you, great, if it has issues, you'll have to find your own solutions, I don't work on unsupported operating systems. My definition of supported operating systems includes Microsoft supported consumer versions of Windows.

Disk space requirements vary based on how much you backup and what mods are installed. A game backup will take up as much space as the game (but can also take less).

Internet connection is required for dynamic features such as the Third Party Importing Service. While an internet connection is not required after the first boot, some features will not work as well without a connection to ME3Tweaks or GitHub.


Support for ME3Tweaks Mod Manager and other ME3Tweak services and products are handled in the ME3Tweaks Discord.

Is your game(s) pirated?
I don't support users who pirate their games. People spent years of their lives making these games, the least you can do is pay for the software they developed. If you have issues with your pirated game don't bother commenting or asking for help because you won't find any.

Is your game cracked but "you bought the game"?
Still not supported. I do not and will not support unofficial copies of any of the games.



Legendary Explorer Core
Almost all package handling code is based on Legendary Explorer Core, the main modding library for the scene. I'd like to single out SirCxyrtyx and Kinkojiro for their hard work in recent years on helping make it better for everyone.

Aquadran
For developing lzma, lzo and zlib wrapper for fast decompression and compression of data, for code used for textures checking from Mass Effect Modder C#.

License
ME3Tweaks Mod Manager is open source under GPLv3 on the ME3Tweaks GitHub.

Thanks for using my software. It means a lot that I can create tools for others to use.

Donations
If you want to donate to help development, you can view the donations item in the Help menu.