While Bannerlord is still in development, players don’t need to wait until it’s finished. Enjoy the hard work of its active modding community. Many follow the spirit of its predecessor Warband with complete overhauls. While others are about the quality of life features not present in the vanilla game.
Below, we count down our list of the top ten best mods for Bannerlord. According to the general consensus and our own expert opinion. Note that these are mods that change the actual gameplay of Bannerlord, and will exclude those that are resources for modders to make their own. Also, note that Bannerlord is in development. There is always a chance a new patch will create compatibility issues until the mod’s author updates.
Table of Contents
10. Character Import Export
At the top of our best mods for Bannerlord list, we have the Character Import and Export mod.
Warband let players import or export characters at any point of their adventures. This meant you could start a new game with a high-level character just to see what happens. Also, move your favorite builds between modules and continue your story in completely different worlds. Unfortunately, the import/export feature was removed in Bannerlord; fortunately, this mod brings that feature back.
9. Dismemberment Plus
The title of this Bannerlord mod says it all: it adds the ability to decapitate and dismember enemies who have low health and are dealt a killing blow. It may seem like a simple gore patch, but considering the setting, it actually adds a lot of realism to a scenario where hundreds of people were fighting with bladed weapons. Whether or not seeing actual heads and limbs fly is your cup of tea, the option to do so warrants placement on this list.
8. Bannerlord Tweaks
This mod adds various adjustments to Bannerlord’s core gameplay in an attempt to balance its systems. It contains optional changes to virtually every aspect of the game, which allows users to tailor their experience to their own liking for roleplaying control, challenge, or just experimenting with different logic. Some examples of included tweaks are adjustable siege engine build times and childbirth probability, increased battle size limits, aging adjustments, companion limits, and experience multipliers. This mod is essentially a cheat menu, except it is curated toward the most frequently-requested changes and avoids game-breaking tweaks.
7. CA – Eagle Rising – Dawn of an Empire
This is another conversion mod for Bannerlord that adds unique factions, troops, and backstory to the Calradian legend while remaining true to the core aesthetic. It also adds certain factions that exist outside the game’s core themes. Eagle Rising is a favorite among players who want to experience the glory of the Roman conquest. It’s still very much a work in progress, which is the only reason it’s not higher on this list. Its active development and robust community bode well for future improvements that would likely catapult it to the number one spot when it’s completed.
6. Realistic Battle Mod
This is a mod for players who find the combat in Bannerlord too arcade-like and want an experience closer to the wars of attrition that occurred in medieval times. On paper it would seem like RBM just lowers the damage of certain types and buffs defense, it actually considers many more factors, like physics, weight, and material hardness. The result is a truly tactical affair, and combined with a mod like Dismemberment can lead to satisfying outcomes.
5. Improved Garrisons
This mod addresses one of the most requested improvements to Bannerlord’s quality-of-life mechanics among Early Access buyers: town and keep management. Improved Garrisons adds a new standalone user interface, AI, recruitment, training, and overall management. The mod also comes with its own configuration. UI that lets you pick and choose which features are present, so you don’t need to overhaul the entire garrison system if you just want to change a single part.
4. Detailed Character Creation
The title would make this mod sound like it only affects the moments before you begin your adventure. When you’re selecting hairstyles and skin color before these attributes become who you are. While it does include countless tweaks for that part of the game, DCC goes far beyond that. In fact, this mod lets you customize any character in the game. Tired of companions spawning with the same ‘The Alone’, ‘The Wanderer’ nicknames? Want to rename an NPC Lord or Lady after a famous warlord from history? With this mod, you can.
3. Open Source Armory
One of the newer mods to surface in recent months, the Open Source Armory adds a ton of new wearable gear to Bannerlord. A combination of many different armor packs into one compilation, adds almost 1,000 items to the game’s lists. These items are lore-friendly and placed throughout shops and characters so they fit seamlessly into the game world. Like the previous entry on this list, we expect it to become one of the most popular mods in Bannerlord’s arsenal as more stable versions of the game are released.
2. Diplomacy
This mod takes the basic diplomacy features included in vanilla Bannerlord and expands them into a robust experience, which lets the player change the world in countless other ways than fighting. Diplomacy adds alliances, pacts, civil wars, secession, and forced abdication, among many other features.
1. Calradia Expanded and Calradia Expanded Kingdoms
While each has enough new content to be considered their own entry at Number 1 on this list, these mods are listed together because Expanded Kingdoms requires Expanded to work (along with a compatibility mod called Harmony). Together, they add an entire game’s worth of content to Bannerlord’s base, which includes new towns and cities to the existing factions, but also new factions, gear, and entire troop trees. Until other conversion mods like Game of Thrones or Genkokujo make it past their alpha stages, Expanded and Expanded Kingdoms will likely remain the go-to for any players seeking total conversion.
Easily the best Bannerlord mod on the list and functions more like a DLC with the amount of content added.
This concludes our list of the top ten best mods for Bannerlord as of 2022. We expect this list to continue changing with each big update of the game, especially when Bannerlord opens itself to Steam’s Workshop. Until then, you can expect these mods to keep you entertained for the next few hundred hours of gameplay.
Links
2. https://www.moddb.com/games/mount-blade-ii-bannerlord/mods
