The Ultimate World of Warcraft Mod Guide

Anatomy of a UI mod
A WoW UI mod consists of the following components:

1.	A Table of Contents, or ‘TOC’ file. This file contains all the metadata for the mod, including dependencies, version information, the title and a description. This is the file WoW will read first.
2.	One or more Lua files. These files will have the ‘.lua’ extension. Lua files contain all the scripting and programmatic information for the mod and are the files that do the work. They are human-readable and therefore a cinch to edit.
3.	One or more eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, files. These files outline the visual aspects of the mod. That is the buttons, frames and usually the text and colours. Again, they are human-readable (if you understand XML).

These are the essentials of a UI mod. Other files are usually included, such as Targa (TGA) images for use as graphics, readme files and additional programming libraries.

Once a mod has been installed, you can enable/disable it via the ‘Addons’ button found on the character selection screen after you log in to WoW. Other options are available on this screen and include a memory allocation field and a ‘Load out of date addons’ checkbox. For the memory field, the default value of 64MB should be plenty, but if you run a lot of UI mods, you may need to bump this up. The only time you should need to use the ‘out of date’ checkbox is after a new patch has come out and your mods have yet to be updated. While this will activate your mod in-game, there is no guarantee that they’ll function correctly. For more information, see the ‘Getting WoW 1.x mods working in 2.x’ box on this page.

What mods can do
The feature set Blizzard has exposed to the client-side is powerful while remaining limited to prevent exploitation. Perhaps the easiest thing a mod can do is alter the way unit frames look. Unit frames are the boxes that show you and your opponent’s health and mana. By default, these boxes are latched to the top left corner of the screen. A unit frame mod can make these movable, take up less space, and report additional information usually hidden for the sake of simplicity – such as your mana regeneration rate or the armour level of your enemy. Modding is not limited to unit frames – action bars, bag slots and more can be moved and rearranged.

Other mods take things a step further. By reading spell tooltips and your equipment/talent bonuses, a mod can directly alter the information that comes up when you mouse-over a spell in your action bars or spell book, and report back updated values – something Blizzard’s UI does not do. This allows you to see, in realtime, just how much additional damage a spell will do. This is especially good for spells that do not use 100 percent of your spell or healing damage and would be a pain to calculate on the fly yourself.

As you can see, UI mods are all about changing and improving the way your take in information from the game, and making it easier, or more efficient, to tell the game what it is you want to do. Once you get used to a good combination of mods, it can be hard to go back to the default UI.


Getting WOW 1.X mods working in 2.X
With the release of the ‘Before the Storm’ 2.0.1 patch – and the 2.0.3 patch that followed – most UI mods stopped functioning. But not necessarily because they were incompatible with the changes in the patch.

With the new patch, the mod detection routine in WoW simply checks each UI mod’s internal version number, and if the version is less than 20000, renders the mod inoperative for ‘safety’ reasons.

While most popular mods have since received updates, it’s possible that you’re using a mod that isn’t updated often, or at all, and haven’t found a suitable ‘2.0.0’ compatible replacement. If you’re eager to get your old mod working, if only to see if it still works, you can do the following:

1. Browse to the Interface\Addons folder in your main WoW directory,
and open the add-on you wish to manually patch.

2. Look for a file called ModName.toc, where ModName is the name of
the mod.

3. Go to the line that reads ‘## Interface:’ and change the number that follows to ‘20300’.

4. Save the file and start WoW.

If all goes according to plan, WoW will accept the mod as 2.0.0 compatible. There’s no guarantee it’ll work correctly so seek an update or replacement as soon as you can.