Top 33 Best Crusader Kings 2 Mods [2024]

Crusader Kings 2 is a strategy and role-playing game in which you must ensure your dynasty’s success. Instead of 2D portraits, the characters have 3D-rendered models.

The game is set in the Middle Ages. Players handle political ties in medieval Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In the game, Europe is a land still in turbulence.

To make sure the dynasty survives, pick a Christian Lord as you play his descendants’ succession role. A great Lord will always need loyal friends to help him.

The King struggles with the pope as lands are fragmented into petty fiefs. All types of government and religions are playable. Now it is the time of King’s Greatness. Stand ready, and Make sure to secure your dynasty.

With all that said, using mods will add more fun to the game. There are many excellent mods to use. Here is our list of the top 30 best mods that you should check out!

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Best CK2 Mods

33. Romance of the Three Kingdoms

This Crusader Kings 2 mod focuses on China, specifically during the Han Dynasty.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is compatible with version 3.3.3 of Crusader Kings 2 and is an extensive mod to download as it provides several new features.

This mod provides 500 provinces, 16 cultures, and over 5,000 characters. Because of its setting as well, there are new dynamics in terms of battle, nobility, refugee, and the overall imperial aspect of the Han dynasty.

The included campaigns feature the Yellow Turban Rebellion, Battle of Red Cliffs, and much more.

32. Graphics Overhaul

If there is a graphics overhaul for any game, chances are that you should download it, this one for Crusader Kings 2 is of no exception.

The Graphics Overhaul mod by In heaven focuses on altering the appearance of the map and its aesthetic. Using this mod, you can view the map from more of a bird’s eye perspective or as a satellite.

This mod also triples the texture count, providing new effects as well. These effects include improved dynamic atmosphere, water effects, and improved rivers and winters.

31. Patrum Scuta

If you’re a player who enjoys the historical accuracy of some games, then the Patrum Scuta mod will be one of your favorites.

Patrum Scuta is a mod that alters the crests on banners displayed throughout the game for improved accuracy. Many tribes and religions had multiple variations of crests, so in history, there was a crest for everything group practically.

This mod updates templates as well for traditional designs, including those for Slavic, Aztec, Germanic regions, and more.

30. A Bigger Interface

Bigger Interface is a mod that calls itself the first proper (1080p) mod for Crusader Kings 2.

In 1080p gameplay, it makes things so much easier to play as it extends the size of most parts of the Interface, to take proper benefit of the 1080 p screen and shows more information on the screen.

The mod also adds Keyboard shortcuts, and It expands the menu to make things fit well in 1080p. This mod also makes it easier to navigate between the different menu screens.

29. Warcraft – Guardians of Azeroth

Guardians of Azeroth has been in progress since 2017 but only gained more consideration with recent updates. It is based on the Warcraft Universe.

In this mod, the player can create the world of Azeroth, the map is stunning and fully utilizes old possible ways of map design to create something resembling the creation of Azeroth as seen in World of Warcraft and the Warcraft game sequence as closely as possible.

The mod gives players two start dates, one before the occupation of the Horde in the Eastern Kingdoms and the second one during the rise of the Lich King to the far north.

Every player ends up with a fully unique and truly living world and can recreate the historical Empire.

It has many new tools which players can use to make the game character more original. You can play the role of one of the human kings giving gamers much more agencies.

This mod also enhances some play elements of the game too.

28. A Revolutionary Tooltip Font

A revolutionary tooltip font is a simple mod that allows changing the tooltip font.

It is a mod that makes the text bigger so that the player can easily understand without changing the text’s look and feel.

It makes the Crusader Kings 2 more readable on higher resolution. It is one of the best mods new players can use, making the game less stressful.

27. Crusader Kings 2 Plus

Crusader Kings 2 Plus is a mod that allows changing every aspect of the game from the map to core mechanics to events.

Without changing much of the base of the game’s mechanics, it allows making all possible modifications. Its main purpose is to give the gamer more content and choices to explore.

It gives a completely different and more challenging Crusader Kings 2 experience like new events.

26. Medieval Music Complete

Sound design and music play a valuable role in the overall experience of modern videogames. Audio plays a huge role in the game, and the middle ages have their specific sound.

Medieval music complete mod make sure that the sounds you hear in Crusader Kings 2 are unique as it modifies game sounds making it more realistic.

Sound is essential because it engages audiences in conveying knowledge, increasing the production worth, evoking emotional reactions, emphasizing what’s on the screen, and indicating mood.

Medieval Music mod is perfect for all this. This mod is one of the examples of enhancements that reintroduces a bit of history in the game to make it more exciting.

25. Crusader Kings 2 Generator

Crusader Kings 2 generator mod is best for those who want more to get out of the game while maintaining everything vanilla. It also works on a map.

With a completely different history along with several cultures and religions, it develops a completely new world (a new history of mankind) from scratch. It let you grow your societies.

This mod gives you a unique beginning where you can do so many modifications allowing you to name characters, provinces, culture, kingdoms, and religions.

It allows us to reintroduce and develop history in much greater detail.

24. Historical and Fantastical Artifacts

Historical and Fantastical Artifacts mod consists of a variety of historical and fantasy artifacts for your role to accumulate and grow more powerful, like the mythical sword.

It helps characters to develop powerful aircraft and other items and adds almost 45 new design aircraft. This mod is best for playing a game by adding unique and different aircraft to it.

23. Elder Kings

Elder kings are one of the most well-known mods in the world.

This mod throws players into the beloved world of elder scrolls and probably make plenty of people scratch their heads, wondering how Todd Howard hasn’t yet decided to license out the TES franchise to any outstanding strategy gaming company.

This mod has multiple start dates, which are primarily set during the second era, meaning that players can explore the world of Nirn before the timeframe of the single-player mainline games.

This period was a wise pick, seeing as Crusader Kings 2 indeed isn’t just a game of characters but also a game of Empires’ rise and fall.

Elder Kings improves two playable scenarios both contained within the sequence lore’s Second Kingdom, allowing players to experience completely new scenarios.

A mod set during the third era would primarily face the issue of a strong and stable empire, which would be a huge hurdle in designing an exciting mod.

This mod takes you to the world of elder scrolls and has 8 playable scenarios.

The Player will get an original storyline as it is based on lore and fan fiction featuring thousands of characters making the play exciting.

22. Abdication

When your King is old enough to give up the crown, your heir is prepared to take your position, but you still have a few years and have no option but to continue until you die.

In the last years, every character wants to relax and enjoy the wealth accumulated by him.

Abdication mod allows your character to retire from your monarchical responsibilities letting your heir take your place.

However, your artifacts won’t move with you, and when the old ruler deceases later, some of the artifacts get casually destroyed while passing down to you.

21. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum mod changes the feel of Crusader Kings 2 by modifying the Crusader Kings 2 map from a real-looking geographical map to a written map.

As a feudal lord, you can plan where to conquer next by reviewing your unique map. This mod is complete maintenance of the map and many other things.

20. Rich Childhood

The Rich Childhood mod adds 52 new childhood events making the development of your young offspring much more exciting than before, and brings the interim years of a young player rise to manhood.

These events appear based on your courtiers, siblings, and your age group. This mod ensures to make the period of growing up as interesting as adult life.

The mod adds childhood episodes that will appear periodically, allowing your young ruler to form a character’s personality.

When regencies are in charge of a young ruler, the events give the player an exciting encounter.

By using this mod, gamers can play a much more remarkable role in molding their young prince/princess to become the future ruler of their Empire.

19. Colored Buttons

Colored buttons are one of the best mods for new players. The mod allows better optical memorization of the interfaces and modifies the game’s main buttons, making it more colorful.

In this mod, button colors are excellent and very distinct compared to vanilla. Crusader Kings 2 consists of several cosmetic mods that make the game a little bit interesting and easier to play.

This mod makes a game a little bit easier to play by adding colors to the game’s main buttons. And guess what, the mod works in multiplayer too.

18. No Hassles Vassals 2.0

No hassles vassals 2.0 will let you distribute all your barony titles and county in just one click. This version gives you one more modification by giving chance to not give out the province’s baronies flagged by you in the game.

When you right press on the top-level barony, you should have the choice to promote a banner. This is a very effective mod in that sense.

Click on the county you’re interested in, and then right-click on the county shield in the upper left corner. Select “Raise” or “Lower” Banner.

Next, select the Intrigue button, and then find ‘Distribute All Holdings’ in the decision list, probably near the top.

By using this mod, the player doesn’t need to move from one county to another with their King.

17. Historical Immersion Project

Historical immersion project mod is used to make modifications related to the history of a game.

The mod’s main features relevant to the history of the period are the host of accurate play roles.

The mod’s main purpose is to modify the characteristics of the game to make things similar to actual historical occasions and characters more closely.

Immerse yourself in this exciting, accurate historical mod.

16. Sketchy Traits

Sketchy traits mod allows adding exciting and beneficial traits available for players to have and helps to add a feel to the character trait structure.

It re-establishes events allowing psychopaths to spawn lesser than usual, and changes the trait icon of a psychopath to that of a personality trait.

The mod also eliminates background traits and related events, re-establish all traits for Holy Fury by rebalancing it, and adds 6 unique and different personality traits.

By using this mod, the sociopath appears too often, though, which might give you a bit of a challenge.

15. Sketchy Cheat Menu

Sketchy cheat menu makes Crusader Kings 2 much more exciting by giving the player control of almost everything.

The Sketchy Cheat Menu gives player complete hold to modify the game, the potential to do anything under the sun.

Right-click on your character representation and click (enable cheats) to allow cheats in your game.

The mod allows you to force a character to marry you, create children, force them to be loyal to you, get more money or modify your traits, instantly kill someone, commit suicide, clear your ambition or even convert a character’s religion or give them orders and kill their entire dynasty.

The possibility of what you can achieve with this is endless.

14. Trait Softcap Exterminated

It’s perfect for gamers when more individuals contribute to the mods and share them.

In Crusader Kings II, when a player has more than five-character qualities, random events start eliminating them this is called the Trait soft cap, and the trait soft cap exterminated mod removes those occasions.

In vanilla, lifestyle occasion chains will not activate for characters who already have a lifestyle feature.

However, it is possible to gain more than one through certain occasions despite not being lifestyle events.

Also, keep in mind, the mod doesn’t remove every event that takes away your nice traits.

It only removes the random events that take a single random trait when you have more than 5 personality traits.

13. Warhammer – Geheimnisnacht

This mod, Warhammer Geheimnisnacht, has been functional since 2015 and is one of the best feature-packed mods.

Different from most other modding projects, the team chose to have a single start date resulting in an incredibly detailed player experience, which makes gameplay vary greatly depending on a region of a playthrough.

The modding team has formed a ridiculously dense and stunning map of Warhammer Fantasy while not neglecting the artwork for trials, troops, and characters.

This mod invites fans and people new to the Warhammer franchise to take a look at the magnificent lore and immerse themselves into a world full of beasts, magic, and Ratmen.

Warhammer: Geheimnisnacht permits a player to play as almost every faction in the Warhammer creation of Fantasy, featuring a great map, a massive map with every main location in the Warhammer Fantasy World (which spans from Naggaroth to the Mountains of Mourn).

You can become a wizard, cultist, or even a vampire. Almost every race from the Warhammer episodes is playable, each with its different traits and qualities.

12. Cultures and Portraits Revamped

Sometimes visual mods like cultures and portraits revamped can give you a whole different vibe. The mod gives Crusader Kings 2’s characters a more handsome appearance.

It is a graphical modification mod that exchanges many characters’ clothing and looks based on their culture and region.

The mod consists of over 80 different and new portraits such as new graphical blessings or altered existing assets. It recolors the character’s skin tones and reworks facial components.

Maghreb Arabic representations now use vanilla Egyptian hair, beard, and cloth belongings, while Berber and Southern’s Berber portraits use vanilla Egyptian cloth assets.

Coptic portraits now use vanilla Egyptian face and beard assets.

The mod also adds a new portrait set for the Avar culture and adjusts the non-pagan Hungarian portraits’ hair position, making the game much more interesting for players.

11. Better Looking Garbs

Better-looking garbs are one of the cosmetic mods for the game that became popular among gamers.

Better Looking Garbs modifies all character portraits in the game and has over 60 new portrait sets, adds unique and different material to add variety to the character’s face.

It also modifies clothing, looks, hair, and style to make new combinations of portraits.

It customizes appearance decisions for your character, allowing you to pick your outfit and style in the game.

10. Anime Portraits

This mod is so tremendously cute and makes your portrayals look far enhanced than anything with or without DLC.

Anime portraits replace only human characters while all animals still use vanilla portraits.

It modifies and upgrades character portraits to suit the player, oddly fitting portraits for every kind of character and character condition, making this mod both brilliant and terrifying, an impressive graphical modification.

9. Nicknames+++

Wonderful mod, for the most part, nicknames+++ adds 187 different and new nicknames to the game.

All added nicknames use the same aspect and modernizer values as nicknames in the base game.

You might notice a minor increase in values, though, because more nicknames in general have more traits that now activate nicknames.

Nicknames+++ mod gives every character a unique nickname according to their characteristics, making the game a bit easier.

It helps to remember characters by giving them a special nickname. Now almost every characteristic in the game has a unique nickname associated with it, making the game much more fun!

8. Witcher Kings

Many would argue that Crusader Kings 2 is the perfect medium for a Witcher game, a famous video game series. Witcher Kings converts your Crusader Kings 2 game to the Witcher world.

Associate or do war with your characters and play a key role in the continent politics, determining its future as you see fit.

Fans love this mod as it manages to pass the Witcher feeling perfect and includes a lot of things that can be implemented in the vanilla game.

7. Crusader Kings Z

Crusader Kings Z is a small Zombie invasion mod where a devasting zombie outbreak starts in Ethiopia, spreading rapidly from Africa to Europe.

Any time after the player begin the series, there are more than 1000 zombies at one time.

You’ll be playing in a fictional world where zombies come, zombies bring with them a deadly new infection, you struggle to form armies strong enough to stop the spreading infection, restore peace as before and find a way to save your dynasty.

Phew, that’s a good day’s work.

6. When the World Stopped Making Sense

This is one for the history buffs. When the world stopped making sense is a great mod that takes you back to 476 AD, which lines up with the fall of the Western Roman Kingdom and 700 AD—and continuing with that game until the vanilla end date of 1453.

A huge playtime between 476 and 1453 introduces new occasions and, therefore, new decisions to be made.

New mechanics and conclusions bring this unique and different part of world history to life in remarkable detail.

The mod maintains the traditional accuracy of the period as well while having an upgrade province map with major modifications.

5. Game of Thrones

Game of thrones mod is established on the critically admired fictional tales (A song of ice and fire book series) by George R.R. Martin, and it is the only truly feature-complete total transformation mod for Crusader Kings 2.

7 years of progress have led to the seven Realms of Westeros coming to life in an unprecedented way. Most of the vanilla mechanics have been reworked in a way that fits the setting.

One of this mod’s biggest achievements is that the team behind it pulled off, having one massive realm (The Iron Throne) on the map and still making the gameplay fascinating.

Civil wars turned into gigantic messes with individual feudal lords and ladies.

The mod manages to bring railroading together with a player agency by having dynamic systems. The mod team also managed to create and maintain various bookmarks.

This mod gives a complete exciting Game of Thrones experience within Crusader Kings 2, handling massive civil battles with various claimants that expands the Crusader Kings 2 experience to a new level.

4. In Heavens Graphics Overhaul

Another map modification mod that you should have in your inventory of mods is in Heaven graphical overhaul. The mod features 34 new feels that give the map much more life.

This mod tries to reproduce that look you get when seeing earth from the satellite.

It has unique and new graphics, a dynamic atmosphere, dynamic and simple borders, and a new map giving the game a completely different look.

3. Improved Genetics 2.0

Improved genetics 2.0 mod modifies the Crusader Kings 2 genetic structure making heredity in the game more stable and stronger.

Genetics plays a big role in the game as it determines the capabilities and characteristics your heir will inherit as you can only inherit traits from your parents.

Besides this, the mod adds multiple new characteristics in the four polygene groups: intelligence, strength, height, and attraction.

2. Your Personal Castle

By far, your personal castle is one of the most famous mods out there!

Your personal castle allows the player to pass down all the benefits associated with a royal family to feudal rulers while adding flavor to random occasions and decisions.

A player can construct new extensions to make unique castle upgrades in the player’s capital holding.

You’ll be able to build almost anything from a chapel to an observatory, each introducing new occasions that will give you different and new bonuses for each.

Originally, this mod’s purpose was to add advantages to a family palace’s feudal rulers, but some modifications ended up being completely new. They have been added to family palaces too.

1. After the End Fan Fork

We have to thank the dedication of 9kbits that we now have this after-the-end fan fork mod, an original and unique setting that captures a post-apocalyptic America in its varying degrees of rebuilding.

It adds 47 different and new religions, heresies, thousand provinces, locations, and 31 different culture groups to add more flavor to an already great game.

This mod has managed to work all its little in-jokes into a believable world that perfectly utilizes the beautiful map of America.

Gameplay varies heavily from region to region, and it becomes clear that this mod doesn’t intend to leave any region behind as half-baked.

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