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What it does;

- Give light skin to Baranor.
- Replace he's loading/splash screen images with another one.

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Quality of life, you can skip ahead to the install section below if you want.

So here are a few quality of life thing that are useful;

I recommend launching the game, setting your UI, Audio and Graphic settings as you want them.
If you plan on doing a new game from scratch, start a new game now before modding.

FYI your save can be located in one of those location depending on the version you use;

Steam           <Steam-folder>\userdata\<user-id>\356190\remote\<user-id>_ShadowOfWar.sav  (You may want to disable steam cloud sync for this game wile swapping saves.)
GOG.com 	%LOCALAPPDATA%\WB Games\Shadow of War\<Device Name>_ShadowOfWar.sav

If you have trouble with the pathing above, 
i heard it can be located easily by typing   356190   in the search bar from the AppData folder.

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  /!\  Be careful with what you are moving around if you are on an on going game. 
       Do not delete or replace files before you have make back up and tested in game if everything have been done properly.

It is useful for starting a new game with mod enable, but also in the vanilla game since it automatically save and you can't roll back unless you "manually save" through backups.

So, make a game save point, load in and quit once you are free of your movement.
Quit the game and backup this save. 
You should now have a possibility to "restart" a new game (or from whenever the backup is made) if you wish, without having to mess around with the moding tool files.

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How to install;

- First, you need to install the Middle-Earth Mod Loader; 
You can get it on github https://github.com/ReaperAnon/Middle-Earth-Mod-Loader
There is instruction with it provided by the creator but i will put them here as well anyway for convenience.

  Middle-Earth Mod Loader require the latest version of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables. 2015-2022 (x64)

Before you do anything with it, do not forget to make a backup of the   bink2w64.dll   file that the mod loader will replace in the x64 folder. 
So you won't have to re-install the game if you want to revert this change if you do a mistake.

  Go to your game's installation folder, probably located at "...\steamapps\common\ShadowOfWar\x64" 
and rename the normal   bink2w64.dll   file that you just made a backup from, to   bink2w64_.dll

  Place both the   modloader   folder and the new   bink2w64.dll   in the   x64   game folder.

- Now you gonna need the Shadow of War Packet Loader from survivalizeed. 
You can get it on nexus https://www.nexusmods.com/middleearthshadowofwar/mods/49
There is instruction with in it provided by the creator but i will put them here as well anyway for convenience.

  Place both the   PacketLoader   folder and the   ShadowOfWarPacketLoader.dll    
  into the   plugins   folder inside the   x64   folder

If you never moded the game you probably gonna need to create the plugins folder yourself.

- Finally, place the   PacketLoader   folder of my mod into the   plugins   folder.

The pathing should go as ; x64\plugins\PacketLoader\ etc
                                                   
That's it, you'r done.

To uninstall, simply remove all that. Don't forget to give back the   bink2w64_.dll   it's original name.

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Problem & Solutions for the modding tool;

   Modding of this game is fairly new and so are it's tools. 
   The   bink2w64.dll   from the Middle-Earth Mod Loader (As of the latest version at the time of the making of this) 
   can crash the game if you are;
 
- Changing you'r UI, audio or graphic settings
- Taking picture with Photo mode
- starting a new game from scratch

I only made the texture, i took no part in the tools creation and have no idea how it work so i can't help fix it.
But here is a very easy way around the problem;

- Remove the problematic   bink2w64.dll   
- Re-rename the original   bink2w64._dll  to it's normal name.
- Launch the game and get you'r setting as you want them, start a new game if you want and leave once you are loaded in.
- Quit the game and re-re-rename accordingly to what you did before the original .dll, and place back the no longer problematic one in it's place.

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Now about my mod; 

If even after all this you do not see changes in the game, with it installed properly;

You gonna have to re-generate the signature folder.

  To do so;

- Remove the Signatures folder. Located in x64\plugins\PacketLoader\Internal
- open the   PacketLoader   and set cache to = 0 (to generate).
- Launch the game. The loading time may be a little longer with the cache set to = 0 (to generate).
- Check if the mod is working; 
1) Load in your game and visit Baranor.
2) Another quicker way is to go as if you was going to start a new game, if you have the dlc “The Desolation of Mordor Story Expansion".
But do not start it, remember starting a new game from scratch will crash. Hover above with the mouse and look the image of it, if the image you see is not him than it is now working.
- Close the game, you should now have a new Signature folder.
- Open the   PacketLoader   and set the cache back to to = 1 (to read).

Done.

Note that You may or may not have to re-generate the signature folder again after you do modification. 
ex; I had to do it when i was doing some testing, after i had swap the .dll to change settings.
    You probably will need to do it if you add another mod. 



Feel free to reupload - edit - do whatever you want with it.
