All the mods i've took, cooked, and possibly added extra features to.

Nothing here is originally made by me, all credits go to the authors of the original mods.


Asset cooking is a modding technique introduced as a feature of the X2 Mod Build Common [github.com] build system in December 2021.

What it essentially does is take whatever .UPK files you assign to be cooked and it makes them 'game ready', stripping out all sorts of un-needed data to make the package as lightweight as possible. This process can shrink down a mod's size from anywhere between 3x - 10x times, in some cases more, depending on what's getting cooked. Voice Packs for example tend to have the biggest improvements, usually being shrunk beyond the 8x - 9x mark. Your usual cosmetic mod tends to shrink by around 3x - 5x.

This doesn't just save space on your hard drive, this gives noticeable improvements to load times in-game as well, especially when using a bunch of cooked mods vs. uncooked.

One downside is that if someone wanted to browse through a mod's cooked .UPK files and tried to open them with the SDK, because of all the data stripped from the package, including all related SDK information, it flat-out won't work. This is a relatively niche issue, not everyone's gonna be cracking open mod packages for the hell of it, but if there IS a good reason you wanted to look through a mod's files, you'd either have to hope the author left the uncooked source files up somewhere or you'd have to ask them directly if you could have access to them.

If you want a more technical explanation, consult the XCOM Modding Wiki's page on asset cooking.


It's a surprisingly simple process, and you can read up how to do it at the XCOM Modding Wiki's "cooking for dummies" page.