Overview
A noob guide for noobs and by a noob on how to add mods on a Mac for Civ 6, steam version
Introduction / Disclaimers
I’ve never done any modding of any game before.
However, I thought I might try my hand at adding some mods for Civ 6 on a Mac.
I had found some guides for how to use the mods for Civ 5, but as I gathered Civ 6 was more ‘mod friendly’ they didn’t always seem to apply…
So, after a few hours, I figured it out and thought I’d share how to do it.
Note: I will say it again, I don’t do this a lot. This is a guide clearly written by a noob for other noobs. If specific mods aren’t working, I can’t help you. If the folder you are looking for is hidden somewhere else, can’t help you there either. I am just sharing what worked for me with a very plain jane Mac setup – hopefully it helps some others.
Part 1 – What you are doing (generally/conceptually)
Generally speaking, you are adding mod files to a specific directory on your mac.
That is it.
You aren’t changing any code or anything, just dropping some files in a directory.
Apparently Civ 6 is smart enough to know that these are mod files (unlike Civ 5, which required some playing with some code….which made guys like me certain we’d just delete our entire hard drives if we started to do that, like I did once, 25 years ago when my sister was working on an important university paper…..whoops. I digress…)
Once you drop the files in, Civ 6 will know they are there and you can play with the mods or without from within the Civ 6 game.
Slick, eh?
Part 2 – Finding the Mods
You find them online.
Civfanatics has lists of them, the steam discussion forum has lists of them.
Find them, download them.
This is pretty straighforward so if you are reading this guide, I assume you know how to find and download files.
Usual disclaimers about downloading stuff from the internet; that mod you think is going to make your Legion invincible turns out to be a wikileaks style backdoor hack and next thing you know, the russians have installed donald trump as puppet president.
(yeah, sure, right. like THAT would ever happen….)
Part 3 – Installing the mods on the Mac
So this is the “hard” part (for the noob, or this noob, anyway) and is the meat of this guide.
The key is that there is a specific folder that they have to be installed in. Making it worse, the folder is hidden (at least it was for me).
So I spent hours going “where the #$!@!@$ @!#$@#” is the folder?
The thing to realize is that the folder will be under your “user” folders in Finder and, more specifically, in the “library” subfolder and, even more specifically, under the “Application Support” subfolder of the library subfolder of your user folder structure. But, the whole “library/application support/” subfolder structure will itself be hidden – meaning you can’t easily find it.
But here is where it is/what you do:
- Open Finder
- IGNORE the search box.
- instead, click on the “go” menu and then select “go to folder”
- in that window, type the following: “~/library/Application Support/” (without the quotation marks, obviously)
- that will now show you the previously hidden library folder under your user name….
- Then, within the “Application Support” folder find and select the “Sid Meier’s Civilization 6” folder (note: for Civ 5, I think some of the folder selection required going to the “Steam” folders – ignore those, just go to the SMC 6 folder)
- from there, there is a folder called “Mods”
Great, now you have the right folder.
So, go back to your downloaded mod and unpack it (assuming it is a .zip or whatever) into that Mods folder.
eg: the first mod I installed was the “unit report screen” mod – so I made a subfolder of the Mods folder called “unit report screen” and put the contents of the .zip for the mod into that folder (4 files)
That’s it.
The mod is now there and will be recognized by the game
Part 4 – Using the Mods in game
Now, next time you launch the game, select the “additional content” menu off the start and your newly installed mods should be there.
You can just check the boxes for the mods you want to use.