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Mods & base content

The mod / base-content split lets a designer ship reusable content packs (a custom raid, a faction-balance pass, a weapon-skill revamp) on top of a frozen baseline.

Base content

cluster.base_content is the canonical 3.3.5a (or 2.4.3 / 1.12) seed every game starts from. Operators rarely touch this — it's the equivalent of the AzerothCore upstream content drop. The /admin/design/base-content page lists the version, source repo, last sync timestamp, and lets the operator pull in a refreshed upstream.

Mods

cluster.mods carries operator-defined content packs. Each mod has:

  • Identity — name, slug, author, version, description.
  • Manifest — JSON listing every entity type the mod adds / edits (items, quests, creatures, scripts, addons).
  • Dependencies — required base content version, required other mods.
  • Status — draft / published / deprecated.
  • Per-game enable list (cross-link to Realms admin to bind a mod to a game).

The /admin/design/mods page surfaces a mod-marketplace style list; clicking one drills into the manifest, the entities it adds / edits with diff vs base, and an enable-on-game button.

Mod authoring workflow

  1. Designer creates a draft mod row.
  2. Edits content (items / quests / creatures / scripts) under /admin/design/*. The patch staging area tracks them as part of the active mod.
  3. stctl content build-game packages the mod into an .rcmod artefact.
  4. Patch flow ships the artefact to clients via the Patches pipeline.

Built-in addon (AIO)

Every mod can bundle Lua addon code that ships in the same .rcmod. The launcher unpacks it into <wow_path>/Interface/AddOns/<folder> automatically — no manual download. See the Splintertree AIO architecture for the client / server contract.

Glue-screen mods

A subset of mods modify the GlueXML (login / character-select) layer. These ship via locale-specific client-patches/locale-XXX/Interface/AddOns/Blizzard_RC* paths, overriding the original Blizzard_GlueXML behaviour.