Total War: Three Kingdoms

TK Mod Manager

Profiles, real load order, and one-click script-extender injection.

Install

Download the zip from the latest release, unpack it into any folder, and start TKModManager.exe. It is portable — nothing is installed and nothing is written to the registry. Updates install in place from the same zip.

Your settings, profiles, notes, Workshop cache and downloaded DLLs live in %APPDATA%\TKModManager, so they survive an update or a move.

Upgrading from 0.3.x 0.3.x looks for a single .exe in the release and will report that there is no update. Download TKModManager-x64.zip once by hand and unpack it; everything in %APPDATA%\TKModManager is kept.
The TK Mod Manager window: tabs and profile selector across the top, the mod list with load order and status dots, and the details and launch panel on the right
Tabs, profile and Settings across the top; the mod list in load order; details and launch controls in the right-hand column.

The mod list

Every pack the manager can see, in the order the game will load it. Mods lower in the list win: the precedence model is vanilla < mod packs in list order < movie packs, and the last pack to provide a file is the one that takes effect.

Drag rows to reorder. Double-click a row to enable or disable it. Use Add group to make a folding tree row — ticking the group header turns every mod in it on or off, and dragging the group moves all of them together. Row height is Compact, Normal or Large.

Status dots

Green — up to date.
Amber — last updated before the current game build. Informational, not a problem in itself; plenty of good mods are simply finished.
Red — update pending: Steam has a newer version than the one installed. Read from Steam's own Workshop manifest, so it works offline.
Grey — a local pack, or no data to compare against.
SE SE — this mod needs the script extender. The chip turns red when the current launch would not provide it.

You can filter and sort by status, source, type and text, and the details pane on the right explains whatever state the selected mod is in. The cut-off date for "older than the game patch" defaults to the game executable's build date and can be changed in Settings.

How it launches the game

The manager writes tkmm_mods.txt into the game folder and starts Three_Kingdoms.exe directly with that file, rather than going through the CA launcher. That is what gives it real control over load order.

  • Workshop packs load from wherever Steam already put them, via add_working_directory. Nothing is copied into data/.
  • Movie-type packs in data/ that you turn off are excluded with exclude_pack_file.
  • Files are never renamed or moved. Turning a mod off in the manager does not touch it on disk.

Steam, Epic and Game Pass

The manager finds every copy of the game on the PC — Steam libraries, the Epic launcher's installs and XboxGames — and you pick which one to manage with the Copy box next to Play. Each copy keeps its own profiles, so Steam Workshop packs do not show up as "missing" under Epic. Packs in the game's own mods\ folder, where the Epic and Game Pass builds keep them, are listed as mods/.

The Epic copy works differently Epic will not let anything but its own launcher start the game, and CA's launcher passes its own mod list. So for Epic the profile is written to the game's user.script.txt, which the game reads on every start: the manager opens Epic, you press Play in CA's launcher, and injection happens as usual. The file is removed when the game exits, or if the app was closed mid-launch. If CA's launcher has mods of its own ticked, the manager says so before launching. The Epic build ignores a save passed on the command line, so Load save is refused there.

Steam must be running to launch a Steam copy and for the Workshop features.

Script extender

Tick Script extender in the launch panel. After the game reaches the main menu the DLL is injected once; the DLL verifies the game build itself and the launch panel shows the result. A DLL built for another game build is never injected.

All versions… lists every published script-extender release with its date and the game build it was made for. Installing an older one pins it, so that version is injected instead of the newest match until you choose Always use newest. A single DLL release can cover several game builds through a builds list in its manifest.json.

Before launch, the panel lists any enabled mod whose script-extender need is unmet — extender turned off, no DLL for this game build, or an installed DLL outside the mod's version range — each with a one-click fix.

See the script extender page for what the DLL actually does, and the API reference for scripting it.

Declaring that your mod needs the script extender

Ship this file inside your pack:

SE/script_extender.json

Its contents look like this:

{
    "author": "Ironic",
    "minimum_version": 0.28,
    "maximum_version": 0.28,
    "notes": ""
}

A pack needs the script extender exactly when it contains this file — there is no heuristic and no per-mod override.

  • Every field is optional, and a trailing comma is tolerated.
  • Versions may be numbers or strings, such as "0.28.1".
  • They compare as dotted versions, so 0.30 is newer than 0.28 — and a maximum of 0.28 allows every 0.28.x release.
  • The manager warns before launch when the installed DLL falls outside the range, in either direction.
  • author and notes are shown in the details pane.

The game never loads the SE/ folder, so the file is harmless to ship.

Conflicts and Logs

The Conflicts tab lists every file path provided by more than one enabled pack, together with the packs that contain it in precedence order, and a per-pack count of how many collisions it takes part in. Pack indexes are read lazily (header and index only) and cached, so a rescan on a large setup is cheap.

The Logs tab collects the logs a run produces — the script extender's own log, plus the game-root logs that mods write (lua_mod_log.txt, the newest script_log_*.txt and ironic_log_*.txt) — so you can read them without hunting through folders. Reading is restricted to files under the game root or the manager's DLL folder.

Updates

On startup the app checks for both app and script-extender updates and asks before installing anything, with Install, Skip this version and Not now. A skipped version is never offered again. Nothing downloads or installs without your say-so.

Pre-releases are only offered when Settings → Behaviour → Include pre-releases is ticked; the stable channel stays on full releases.

Building from source

The workspace has two crates. crates/core (tkmm_core) is everything except the window — pack scanning, profiles, groups, launch and injection, Workshop, updates — with no GUI and no Qt needed; CI runs its tests. crates/app (tkmm) is the Qt Widgets UI. 

cargo test -p tkmm_core                                                        # core tests
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\build.ps1 [-Release] [-Run]   # the app
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\release.ps1 [-Publish]        # release zip

The UI builds against Qt 6 (MSVC) from KDE Craft in C:\CraftRoot and the ritual-generated Qt bindings from an RPFM checkout — the same setup RPFM uses — so it builds on a prepared Windows PC only. To run a dev build, put C:\CraftRoot\bin on PATH and set QT_PLUGIN_PATH=C:\CraftRoot\plugins.

License

MIT. You are free to use, modify and redistribute it, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice and licence text come along.

Something went wrong

Ask in the 190 Expanded Discord, or open an issue on GitHub. The Logs tab is the fastest way to find out what the game and the script extender thought was happening.