oliver

oliver is a CLI mod development tool for Baldur's Gate 3.

Installation

via crates.io

oliver can be installed via crates.io:

cargo install oliver

Usage

Usage information for oliver can be printed by running oliver --help:

Lightweight CLI mod development tool for Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux

Usage: oliver <COMMAND>

Commands:
  pack    Pack loose mod files into an archive loadable by the game
  parse   Print a summary of the contents in a given file
  unpack  Unpacks all of the files contained in a mod
  help    Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

FAQ

Does Baldur's Gate 3 even support Linux?

Technically, yes! Larian surprised everyone (or at least me) with a native Steam Deck release, and it's possible to run it on arbitrary Linux distros by not selecting any compatibility tool when running the game.. However, Steam also provides a built-in tool called Proton that can be enabled for running Windows games on Linux. While compatibility for games is made on a best-effort basis, in practice a fairly large number of games work well on Linux via Proton. A large number of the compatibility issues that do arise are related to anti-cheat measures, which Baldur's Gate 3 does not utilize (presumably in part due to not featuring competitive online multiplayer).

Proton is based on the venerable open source tool Wine; essentially, Proton is an augmentation of Wine for running things specifically with the Steam runtime.

Are there any Baldur's Gate 3 mod managers supporting Linux already?

Yes; SigilSmith is a TUI mod manager for Linux that supports BG3, and in the past there have been others like Lampray.

Why is oliver specifically for Linux?

While there isn't much reason that oliver couldn't run on Windows, there also isn't much need; lslib is the most widely used mod development toolkit by far, and it natively supports Windows. There are also other options like Modder's Multitool, and the [Mod Manager](Baldur's Gate 3 Mod Manager) also has some built-in features for mod developers.

Because oliver was designed for my own specific use case, handling the cases where Linux and Windows behave differently and how the game files are laid out on each system simply wasn't necessary and would have been extra work. Feel free to try it out on Windows if you'd like or file bugs/feature requests related to it, but I can't guarantee I'll end up addressing them.

Why is it named oliver?

Oliver is the name of one of my two cats (pictured below). I originally planned to make oliver into a full-fledged CLI mod manager and name the GUI version after my other cat, Xiba (hence the name of the repo). However, I ran into issues figuring out how to get the mod packing logic working and stopped working on it for a while after the built-in mod management was added to the game and I found it worked fairly well for Linux.

More recently as I've started development mods myself, I found a need for the ability to pack mods easily on Linux and was able to finally get the mod packing working (with some generous guidance from Norbyte, the author of lslib). The recent publishing of SigilSmith along with potential future options from experiments like BG3 Mod Manager considering adding Linux support and Nexus Mods looking into a new mod manager that supports Linux natively makes it unlikely I'll end up deciding to spend time developing a full-fledged mod manager again, so I might need to figure out another project to name after Xiba.