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Monster Hunter Wilds has an impressive character creator, letting players make all manner of Ronalds McDonald and Hatsunes Miku (which you can use yourself by importing Wilds character design codes). It also lets me make an unsettlingly accurate recreation of my own face so I can watch my mild-mannered, writerly self annihilate condominium-scale reptiles. Capcom, however, has identified our universal desire to have cool-looking characters as a source of potential revenue.
As with the last two Monster Hunters, readjusting your hunter’s appearance beyond basic hairstyle and color tweaks—something that, in an ideal world, would be a freely available feature—is locked behind Character Edit Vouchers: single use consumables that, outside of promotions and limited in-game events, can only be acquired through microtransactions.
You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that modders have gotten right on that.
Enter the Unlimited Character and Palico Edits mod, which at time of writing has already been downloaded more than 13,000 times since creator Ridog8 posted it on Nexus Mods on Saturday night.
In extremely “I’m not touching you” fashion, the mod doesn’t add any Character Edit Vouchers or prevent the game from subtracting one to edit your hunter or palico appearance. Instead, it simply lets you initiate appearance customization when you have zero vouchers. It’s the same principle as setting the prices in a vending machine to “none money,” except instead of a soda you get a new face.
How to use the Monster Hunter Wilds unlimited character edits mod
Bypassing Monster Hunter Wilds’ $7 Character Edit Vouchers is a quick process. You’ll just need a free Nexusmods account for the downloads.
- Download the REFramework mod used as the foundation for most Monster Hunter Wilds modding. Install REFramework by simply extracting the “dinput8.dll” file from the zip download to your game’s install folder (\steamapps\common\MonsterHunterWilds).
- Run Monster Hunter Wilds once. A ‘reframework’ folder should automatically be created in the game’s install folder.
- Download the Unlimited character and palico edits mods from Nexus. Extract the “UnlimitedCharacterEdits.lua” file into the ‘autorun’ folder (steamapps\common\MonsterHunterWilds\reframework\autorun).
- Boot up the game and head to the character edit screen from the main menu as you’re loading the game. Even if this screen lists zero vouchers, the edit option should still appear. (X on a controller or the G key on your keyboard).
You can confirm the mod is loaded and functioning by opening the REFramework menu (‘Insert’ key by default) and expanding the “ScriptRunner” menu option.
Note that if your game crashes with REFramework installed, that’s not uncommon—the version of the mod built for Monster Hunter Wilds is still brand new and has been reported to cause crashes on game start, as well as after 30 minutes or an hour of play. If your primary interest right now is doing some light character tweaking, you may want to just install the mods temporarily, do your face crafting and then delete dinput8.dll to get rid of REFramework until the mod’s developers have worked out the kinks.
How well Capcom will tolerate a circumvention of Character Edit Voucher purchases is an open question. Back in 2018, Capcom’s stance on mods for Monster Hunter: World was simply that “modded content is not officially supported,” and despite some World mods having been downloaded more than 5 million times I couldn’t turn up any reports of players having been banned for mod use.
Since 2023, Capcom’s stance has hardened to an official position that “all mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported.” But even that hasn’t prevented 70,000 downloads of a mod for Dragon’s Dogma 2 that circumvents its own character edit microtransaction items—items that drew their own share of outcry.
Whether or not Monster Hunter mod users might suddenly find themselves beneath a descending ban hammer is something only Capcom knows. Presumably, they’d be more keen to target players attempting to skirt aesthetic DLC purchases when the ability to show off to other players online is part of the intended business model.
If you use the mod to give your hunter a free makeover, know that you’re doing it at your own risk.
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Kurt Indovina
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