Community Patch - Menu Strings

The mod provides pre-made localized strings for a number of standardized submenus for Options -> Mods menu to help with resolving a problem with menu entries limit.

The mod is meant to be used by modmakers as a common modding resource to create a better menu structure and alleviate the problem with limited entries. It can also be used by the players to resolve the problem with existing mods.

Mod menus limit

There is a limit on how many entries a menu can have: it equals to 10. By convention, mods that provide in-game menus to tweak their settings add them to [Main Menu]->Options->Mods menu. When you have more than 9 mods with menus (10th is the “Back” entry), some of them won’t be displayed, because there’s not enough space in the list and the menu doesn’t have apparent scrolling functionality.

The problem with menu entries is that they can’t be just added via simple xml editing - you need localized strings with matching IDs for them to be displayed by the game. This mod provides 9 ready-to-use menu IDs with properly localized strings:

Names:
Alchemy and Equipment
Camera
Characters
Combat
Gameplay
Quests and Adventures
User Interface
Visuals and Graphics
Miscellaneous

IDs:
alchemy_and_equipment
camera
characters
combat
gameplay
quests_and_adventures
user_interface
visuals_and_graphics
miscellaneous

And there also is the default “Mods” ID for the Mods menu in Options.

Installation

Unpack and copy to <Path To The Witcher 3>/Mods folder. The mod does nothing by itself when installed! It’s a resource used by other mods to arrange their menus. If you want to use it to fix the problem with older mods you have, you need to manually edit menu xmls for these mods (see below).

Keep in mind that the next gen edition requires all the xml files to be listed in dx11filelist.txt/dx12filelist.txt to be visible in game!

Uninstallation

Delete <Path To The Witcher 3>/Mods/modMenuStrings folder.

Using the IDs to fix the mod menus limit

Let’s look at the menu for Combat Stance mod as an example. It can be found in <Path To The Witcher 3>/bin/config/r4game/user_config_matrix/pc/modCombatStanceConfig.xml file after you install the mod.


“displayName” entry is what you need to edit - for each mod you want to change and for each of the menus that mod has. Hint: to find all of the menus, search the file for “Mods.” (without quotation marks).

Now let’s change the menu under which this mod resides. It’s a combat mod, so it’s logical to have it in Options->Mods->Combat. We can do it by editing “displayName” entry like this:


Save the file, run the game: it’s done.

There is one issue you will encounter when manually editing mod’s menu xml: if the mod has presets, the header for those will be displayed as non-localized ID instead of localized text. But since this header is not used for anything, the issue is not important. This is how it looks:


And this is how it should look normally:


Not a big deal.