In various places on the web (such as on Desura[www.desura.com] or Proboards[coe3.proboards.com]) you will find "mods" (modifications) to the game for download. Or you can make your own. (A modding manual can be downloaded from the CoE3 page at Illwinter[www.illwinter.com].)

Each mod is an ASCII text file, the name of which ends with ".c3m". There should also be a 256×64 pixel targa image to represent the mod in menus, and there may be additional targa images for unit sprites used by the mod, and/or possibly some graphical user interface elements.

Copy all of this to your CoE3 mods directory.

• Linux and Mac: ~/.coe3/mods
  
• Windows 7 and Vista: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\coe3\mods
  
• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\coe3\mods
  
• (On any Windows: %APPDATA%\coe3\mods.)

The .coe3 directory on Linux and Mac is hidden, of course (since its name begins with a dot), and the corresponding directory on Windows is normally hidden too. (Look elsewhere for instructions on how to deal with hidden directories on your operating system.)

In the main menu, presented when you start the game, there is a Mods entry.
Click on this (or press D).

If the game crashes when you select Mods, this is probably because the author of one or more of the mods currently in your mods directory forgot to include an icon command in the mod. (The crash appears to happen only on Linux and Mac, not on Windows.) In that case, a quick and dirty fix is to load the mod file in a text editor and insert a line like this:
(A real image is better, of course. See below.)

Selecting Mods sends you to the mods menu, which is simply a list of all the mods currently in your mods directory.

• Left clicking on a mod will activate or deactivate it.
  
• Right clicking on a mod will show a description for it.

Description missing: If the author forgot to include a description command in the mod, there won't be any description shown when you right click, of course.

In that case, if you feel there is some info on the mod that needs to be readily available during play, you can always add your own description. Load the mod in a text editor and insert a line like this:
(Note that you cannot use literal new lines in the description text, but the character ^ will have the effect of a hard line break in the game.)

If, on exit from the mods menu, the game crashes, this may be because the game cannot find sprite images referred to in an activated mod. This can be a problem particularly on Linux when the mod was developed on Windows. Inconsistent use of letter case in file names doesn't matter on Windows but does on Linux. (The file/folder name "Sylvan" = "sylvan" on Windows, but not on Linux.) Other possible problems include Windows-style backslashes in file paths (they should be normal slashes in a CoE3 mod) or perhaps non-ASCII characters, like typographic quotes in some 8-bit encoding instead of ASCII double quotes. Load the mod file in a text editor and check file paths.

• Before play (while still in the main and mods menus): The mod banner images of active mods are displayed to the right of the screen. Thus, each time you start the game, you can instantly see what mods are active.
  
  
• During play: Press F6 for a list of currently active mods. Here you can right click on a mod to see its description.

Description missing: See above.

If the mod author published his mod without any banner image, none will be displayed while the mod is active, of course.

In that case, you can always make your own. Just fire up your GIMP or whatever image editor you prefer, and create a 256×64 pixel image, then save it as a targa file (file name ending: .tga).

I did just that for the image-less mods I had in my mods directory. My images are as basic and unexciting as it gets, just white text on transparent background (actually white on black, but black counts as transparent in the game, as long as the image is stored without alpha channel). But they serve their purpose.

And since I have already created them, I might as well share them. I put all images in a single zip file as they take up almost no space. Just download the zip[www.dropbox.com], use the ones you want and throw away the rest.

Included in my zip are basic (unexciting) banner images for the following image-less-as-published mods:

• Balance[www.desura.com]
  
• Horror Cult[www.desura.com]
  
• Disciples of Decay[www.desura.com]
  
• Count[www.desura.com]
  
• Immobile AI[www.desura.com]
  
• Cheat Codes[coe3.proboards.com]
  
• Player Check[coe3.proboards.com]

Once you have extracted the targa images in your mods directory, or created your own, load the corresponding mod file in a text editor, and insert an icon command with the path to the image. The file path should be enclosed in ASCII double quotes. For instance:
Important: Don't use Windows-style backslash characters to separate names of directories and files. Use normal slash characters, regardless what OS you're on.