Manual Installation
This is a guide on how to manually install the mod without the use of Steam Workshop. Please note this guide is only applicable to the Steam version of ES2 on Windows. Microsoft Game Pass version cannot use mods whatsoever, and I'm not familiar enough with the Mac version of ES2 to know how to install mods onto it.
Also please do keep in mind that some features and changes to the base game are locked behind content enabled by the Vaulters DLC, so make sure you have that. Otherwise, no other DLCs are necessary for this Mod to function.
To begin installation, you need to download the mod. This can be a bit confusing, as there are many different versions of the mod available at any time for you to download. You can choose to either download the beta, or to download a backup. Scroll to the section relevant to you.
Generally, there are two versions you may want to download. main and development.
main will be the default branch you see when you go to this page. This will be the last major release of the mod (the version before the most up to date test mod).
development will be the current version we are testing. To access it, you need to go to this page, and click on the text main:
After you do this, you will see a dropdown with potentially many options. Pick the one that most closely matches development-1-{number}, with {number} being the version we are currently testing. If you aren't sure which to choose, you are welcome to ask in #balance-mod on the ESG discord.
After you have your selected version, whether it be main or development, you should see a green button titled "Code" somewhere near the middle of the page. Once you click on it, you should see a menu pop up, hit "Download Zip"
Once you've finished this, move on to the Install ESG section.
You have several options for this. The most convenient way is to just go onto the Steam workshop and subscribe to the version of ESG you want. However, if for some reason this doesn't work for you, all of the previous versions of ESG are available in our releases here.
What you would want to do, is scroll until you find the version you want, then download the first .zip option, named under the format of ESG_Competitive_Balance_Mod_{version}.zip.
Once you've downloaded the version you want, continue to Install ESG section.
After you do this, open the .zip, and navigate until you find a folder named "Endless Space Competitive Mod"
Extract this folder into Documents/Endless Space 2/Community, if you do not have a Community folder make one. You do not have it by default. If you have extracted it correctly, the folder should appear like this:
After you've extracted it, you may launch Endless Space 2 and navigate to your mod menu. Locally installed mods will be at the very bottom of your mods list. If you can't find it, make sure you've toggled the "Local" mod switch to be enabled. If it's enabled and the mod still doesn't show up, then you haven't installed the mod correctly.