I think it was on my 17th character creation session that I decided it was time to venture forth into the territory of Baldur’s Gate 3 mods.
Larian Studios has done a truly fantastic job with Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creation system, letting you build a whole host of adventurers to tackle the game’s epic story. However, in a few areas I felt there was room for even more choice. Luckily, after I headed on over to the Baldur’s Gate 3 Nexus, I realised that’s exactly what a load of very talented modders thought, also.
After just a handful of months, Larian’s fantasy RPG masterpiece now boasts a smorgasbord of mods, and PC Gamer currently runs you through some of the essentials and most notable in our best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods roundup. But I was specifically interested in cosmetic mods for Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator that seamlessly offer even more choice in character creation without breaking the game’s tone.
After a little browsing and a successful expansion of the stock game’s character creation options, these are the three cosmetic mods that I would now recommend to other PC gamers who want more, but consistent, Baldur’s Gate 3.
This is just a no-brainer for anyone who wants more choice when choosing the hairstyle for their next Baldur’s Gate 3 character. Toarie’s mod adds more than 100 extra hairstyles into the game, and does so without replacing any of the stock hairstyles. Most of the hairstyles are for human/elf/half-elf/drow/tiefling bodytype 1 and for bodytype 2, but there are hairstyles for gith as well. Many of the hairstyles are brand new, while others offer small tweaks or improvements on existing hairstyles.
There are plenty of simply luscious hairdos in this pack, and I ended up even naming my character, Flidais (a figure in Irish Mythology whose name translates as ‘beautiful hair’), based on the luscious locks I outfitted Flidais with. Toarie deserves a big hat tip for Tav’s Hair Salon. Chapeux!
Need a fresh new face for that Salami-mancer character you’ve been planning? Well, while not adding quite as many options as Tav’s Hair Salon, Faces of Faerun is a great mod that adds a bunch of new faces for use over a variety of races. As with Tav’s Hair Salon, this mod doesn’t remove any default faces either. These faces feel like they fit with Larian’s, too, which is great when in-game as the player’s character doesn’t markedly stand out in terms of style when compared to other companions and NPCs.
Rounding off the cosmetic upgrades is this powerful mod by labotor that allows players to inject a variety of new eye sets into the game. These range from upgrades/tweaks to existing eyes, adding glow effects or removing pupils for example, through to more extreme sets such as cat and goat eyes. There’s a limitation to the mod in the sense that you can only enable one set and they will override existing eyes, but labotor has been smart and restricted the changes to the character creator only. This means that even with the preset installed, only the player character will be able to select and feature eyes from the preset, not NPCs in the game. This means that you won’t suddenly find Withers with burning red full glow peepers. I selected the Glow Eyes preset, which just adds a lovely ring glow to my irises.
There are loads more options available right now, too, in terms of cosmetic mods for Baldur’s Gate 3 character creation, such as an exotic selection of horns to make Wyll well jel. So if you’ve already experienced what the vanilla game can offer multiple times, maybe consider downloading the Baldur’s Gate 3 Mod Manager and getting started yourself with a few choice cosmetic mods that strike your fancy.