As written in part 1, my original intent was simply get into Rise. Then in part 2 I looked into mods to tweak the game, but couldn’t find anything worthwhile, but got some interesting mods for World instead.
Now, I dug enough to bring much of the same to Rise as well. So here’s the update with some more specific instructions to deal with it all.
1 https://github.com/praydog/REFramework/releases (I don’t think there’s any point getting “nightlies” for this)
2 https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/848
3 my monster health x2 scaling
4 https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/1061
5 https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/1300
6 https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/3225
extra: https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/1140 (this one hides all monsters from the map, look the comments section on that page as you need to perform a little manual editing)
The first is the usual basis to load mods, just one “dinput8.dll” that you place in the game main directory. The second is another dll file going into “reframework\plugins”, again used to load the rest.
The third is MINE. Since I couldn’t find a proper health scaling, I’ve done it on my own. The health scaling linked in part 2, for World, had a x2.6 increase on all monsters. I’m not sure if that may be even excessive, so for ease of editing and to be a bit conservative, my own is a x2 buff applied uniformly to everything. I have no idea how this applies in multiplayer (it’s possible that all other values are dependent on the ones I’ve edited, so everything grown in proportion… maybe), this was done just to buff health pools in single player for my own use. Just one file “system_difficulty_rate_data.user.2” going inside “natives\STM\enemy\user_data”
In case you want to edit it yourself, you need the editor. Then just load the file. I had no idea what I was doing, so I simply doubled ALL the values within “VitalTableRateList” and I’ve briefly tested this in game and it seems to work. I’m quite sure only a portion of those tables are actively used, but I manually edited all those 512 entries just to be sure… I found a mod that I used as an example, but that one only edited the multiplayer scaling, rather than base values.
Fourth link is to a loader for custom quests, used in the fifth link, that is just a collection of very hard custom quests. Adding quests seems relatively harmless since it’s just more stuff that you can optionally do. It shouldn’t mess with any of the vanilla content, so I just decided to install everything. Tho the quest editing is interesting, as it seems a relatively simple and flexible system to use and do whatever you want. This page being quite useful to have an idea of how things work internally and the type of control you have.
The fifth, that I have not yet tested, removes scout flies effect from the game. The green glow same as the mod in World.
Beside that, there are a couple more additional mods that could be interesting. One is some AI tweaks for increased difficulty (beware that the page mentions some issues). And another is Follow Me mod that overhauls a bit the companions system so that you can sort of simulate multiplayer offline. You can basically bring more AI companions to a hunt and manually tweak both the damage they do AND the actual monster scaling. So this could work even as a direct replacement for my own edit and give you more control on how the scaling works. I’m not sure it’s a perfect solution though. One advantage of single player is to reduce the chaos of a fight. So using additional companions can be fun to mess with, but I prefer keeping the visual noise down. And I don’t know if you can tweak properly the scaling while also keeping the vanilla structure for companions. As I said, I haven’t tested this.
Just in case you want to browse internal files and extract solely what you want, or just need a vanilla backup to compare, you can use this. So for example to extract the one file I edited for monsters health pools, I loaded “re_chunk_000.pak.patch_001.pak” that I suppose is the patch to the main file, and so should have the most up to date data the game uses.