Disable “From the first stirrings of life” and/or era start loading screen narration

Overview

This guide is for people who are sick and tired of hearing the opening era paragraph. You can also make it so that ONLY the ancient era start narration gets disabled. Whichever you prefer.

Introduction

If you like to restart new games a lot (like me), Sean Bean’s narration can get very annoying very quickly, and I would much rather listen to his description of the civs instead of his same-old, same-old “From the first stirrings of life beneath water…” paragraph. My game usually finishes loading once I reach the point to where he starts talking about the civ, so I never really get to hear it.

This guide is for people who are sick and tired of hearing the opening era paragraph. You can also make it so that ONLY the ancient era start narration gets disabled. Whichever you prefer.

Navigating to the file

Navigate to your game folder (not the Documents folder, the actual folder that your game is installed in) and go to BaseAssetsUIFrontEnd. Open LoadScreen.lua with whatever text editor you prefer.

Disabling “From the first stirrings of life…” loading screen narration

To make the narration play in all era start loading screens except for the ancient era, replace the following line of code (line 351):

UI.SetSoundSwitchValue(“Era_DawnOfMan”, UI.GetEraSoundSwitchValue(dawnOfManEraHash));

with these lines of code:

if (dawnOfManEraHash ~= -1851407529) then UI.SetSoundSwitchValue(“Era_DawnOfMan”, UI.GetEraSoundSwitchValue(dawnOfManEraHash)); end

Disabling all era start loading screen narrations

To disable the narration for any era paragraph entirely, replace the same line of code with:

–UI.SetSoundSwitchValue(“Era_DawnOfMan”, UI.GetEraSoundSwitchValue(dawnOfManEraHash));

The above just comments out the line of code so that the sound file doesn’t load.

Disabling ALL loading screen narrations

And for fun, if you would like to disable the narration entirely, replace the following line of code (line 352):

UI.PlaySound(“Play_DawnOfMan_Speech”);

with this line of code (we are again just commenting it out):

–UI.PlaySound(“Play_DawnOfMan_Speech”);

Additional Notes

Make sure that you do not have any mods that overwrite the LoadScreen.lua file (an example would be Better Loading Screen (UI)). If you do, edit that mod’s LoadScreen.lua file and replace these lines of code.
Make sure to update the file after every game update.
If disabling the ancient era start narration does not work, please leave a comment and I will edit this guide to explain how I found that number. It could be that it is different for everyone’s game.

Hope you have fun listening to more civ narrations!

If you make a mod based on my method, please make sure to cite my guide. Thank you.

Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI Guide