WHERE TO BEGIN? FIRST TIME MODDING???

This will be my first attempt at modding and I would like some guidance from the community if possible. There seem to be different tools such as cheatengine, 2ktools and possibly more. Is there a guide on steps one should take to achieve certain things and when its best to use one over the other?

Something I would love to do would be build my own custom court designs and play with them in blacktop. I'd also like to do things like change the scoreboard from saying ringers and ballers to something else. Any tips or guidance that can be offered will be greatly appreciated. Thank you all.

The Goods (aka, TGsoGood, on this forum) YouTube channel has a lot of good video tutorials for various things -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPydhZ ... PeRSmEVynQ

I would start with following the instructions (and maybe a YouTube tutorial) for installing looyh's Hook and getting comfortable with the general process of loading mods, with particular attention to other people's work in the areas you're most interested in.

Specifically regarding the two areas you mentioned, TGsoGood does a lot of work with custom courts. Also, re: Ringers/Ballers, offhand I don't know what triggers those names for practice / blacktop squads (i.e., whether they are actual team names tied to the roster or if they are just hard-coded text strings), but if they're team names, you should be able to edit them with 2K Tools under "Teams". If not, you could simply hex edit those text strings. I'm new to modding / NBA 2K on PC too and made a thread about text-editing recently in which Mahmood provided some helpful tips -> viewtopic.php?f=272&t=113155

I'm happy to help with anything further on that front if it's confusing. Just ask (maybe in that thread, since it's specifically about that topic).

...and I forgot to add that apparently you need to be careful with Cheat Engine, since use of it could get you banned, I think even if what you're doing is just customizing, not actually cheating. Maybe someone with more experience there could chime in though...

...and I forgot to add that apparently you need to be careful with Cheat Engine, since use of it could get you banned, I think even if what you're doing is just customizing, not actually cheating. Maybe someone with more experience there could chime in though...

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I’m going to go ahead and follow a looyh hook tutorial and I’ll also look into the court related content you mentioned. The topic you posted, text editing, was also very interesting and I’m sure I’ll find a good use case for that. 2ktools seems very intuitive so I’ll start with that and then I may reach out for the hex text editing.

Also, thanks for the heads up on cheat engine. In that case, I may leave them as a last resource. When you mention banning, would it be 2K banning me from their online server or steam banning my account altogether from online access?

My two cents:

If you want to add more than 1 mod....I use like 4-5 mods....add them one at a time and then test the game for stability. You may find a mod here and there that has a bug in it and will cause your game to crash or cause other odd behaviors (e.g. I tried a realistic skin texture mod which would cause these "spikey-blob" like characters)

Enjoy! Just remember that even if you mess something up, it can all be reversed. Steam auto saves your game progress to the cloud so even if things go haywire, you can just uninstall the game and reinstall it. Mods make the PC version worth the price of admission and even better than the console versions in my opinion.

PC mods would require no reinstallation, you jut delete them from the mods folder.

My two cents:

If you want to add more than 1 mod....I use like 4-5 mods....add them one at a time and then test the game for stability. You may find a mod here and there that has a bug in it and will cause your game to crash or cause other odd behaviors (e.g. I tried a realistic skin texture mod which would cause these "spikey-blob" like characters)

Enjoy! Just remember that even if you mess something up, it can all be reversed. Steam auto saves your game progress to the cloud so even if things go haywire, you can just uninstall the game and reinstall it. Mods make the PC version worth the price of admission and even better than the console versions in my opinion.

Thank you for the tips! I really appreciate it. I'm going to follow the method you recommended.

have you had a look at this?
viewtopic.php?f=259&t=109575

have you had a look at this?
viewtopic.php?f=259&t=109575

Wow, that's a great resource. Thanks a lot!

...and I forgot to add that apparently you need to be careful with Cheat Engine, since use of it could get you banned, I think even if what you're doing is just customizing, not actually cheating. Maybe someone with more experience there could chime in though...

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I’m going to go ahead and follow a looyh hook tutorial and I’ll also look into the court related content you mentioned. The topic you posted, text editing, was also very interesting and I’m sure I’ll find a good use case for that. 2ktools seems very intuitive so I’ll start with that and then I may reach out for the hex text editing.

Also, thanks for the heads up on cheat engine. In that case, I may leave them as a last resource. When you mention banning, would it be 2K banning me from their online server or steam banning my account altogether from online access?

I recorded a tutorial on how to use 2KTools, I show how to edit teams, players, staff, I hope it works for you:

phpBB [video]

My two cents:

If you want to add more than 1 mod....I use like 4-5 mods....add them one at a time and then test the game for stability. You may find a mod here and there that has a bug in it and will cause your game to crash or cause other odd behaviors (e.g. I tried a realistic skin texture mod which would cause these "spikey-blob" like characters)

Enjoy! Just remember that even if you mess something up, it can all be reversed. Steam auto saves your game progress to the cloud so even if things go haywire, you can just uninstall the game and reinstall it. Mods make the PC version worth the price of admission and even better than the console versions in my opinion.

There will never ever be a situation where you have to reinstall the game because of a disfunctional mod. You are not altering game files, so just remove what you have added to the mod folder and you are good.

What I can recommend you is to make use of the custom resource folder functionality of the hook tool. For each and every mod you add, create a "Mods_xxx" folder (where xxx is the name of the mod). You can then easily enable/disable single mods to see if they are working.