Minecraft Dungeons modding: pak mods, ~mods, and the Blueprint Loader

Minecraft Dungeons is Mojang's Unreal Engine dungeon crawler, a deliberate change of pace from the sandbox, and its modding scene reflects that smaller, focused design. Built on Unreal Engine 4, it takes pak-file mods dropped into a tilde-prefixed folder, and a community loader extends that to Unreal blueprints. The scene is modest next to the main game, but it is well organised, with a dedicated mod kit for authors.

How the scene is shaped

Mods gather on Nexus Mods and CurseForge, and they tend toward what suits a loot-driven crawler: reskins of armour and weapons, texture and model swaps, tweaks to drops and difficulty, and quality-of-life changes. Because Dungeons is Unreal under the hood, the community could reuse familiar Unreal techniques rather than inventing a format from scratch. The result is approachable: most mods are a single pak file, and a loader exists for the more ambitious ones.

The toolchain primer

Pak mods install by hand, and the location is specific. Inside the game's install you open Dungeons\Content\Paks and create a folder named ~mods, with the leading tilde, then drop .pak files into it. The game reads them in alphabetical order, and a mod later in the alphabet overwrites an earlier one, so renaming files is how you control which wins. For mods that need to run Unreal logic, the community Blueprint Loader lets other mods register blueprints that fire on defined triggers. Authors use the Dungeons Mod Kit, a toolset built on Unreal Engine 4 version 4.22; using a different engine version causes problems, so the version pin matters.

What the mods actually do

Dungeons is a finished game with a full run of paid DLC behind it, so the modding scene is not trying to keep it alive the way it might for an abandoned title. Instead it plays to the crawler's strengths. Cosmetic mods reskin armour, weapons, and enemies, often to match other Minecraft media or to add variety the base game never had. Balance mods adjust drop rates, enchantments, and difficulty for players who have exhausted the vanilla curve. Quality-of-life mods smooth out menus and grind. Because runs are short and repeatable, even small tweaks change how the game feels over a long session.

Authoring sits on the same Unreal foundation. The Dungeons Mod Kit gives creators a proper editor, which is why the more ambitious mods can add content rather than only swapping textures.

What you'll find on OpenMods

OpenMods indexes mods from public repositories, so the Dungeons coverage here is a slice of the Nexus and CurseForge scene, weighted toward loaders and tools rather than cosmetic packs. Those sites remain the main destinations for reskins and gameplay tweaks. OpenMods is a better fit for the Blueprint Loader and authoring utilities.

Practical notes

• The folder is ~mods with a tilde. Create it under Dungeons\Content\Paks; the tilde is not optional.
• Load order is alphabetical. Rename paks so the one you want loads last and wins.
• Blueprint mods need the loader. Install the Blueprint Loader before mods that depend on it.
• The mod kit pins UE 4.22. Authoring needs that specific Unreal version, not a newer one.

For the hands-on version, see the Minecraft Dungeons modding guide.