Hi Squaddies,

The snow is melting (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least. We make no guarantees for the cold-hearted either.) and the sun is coming out to shine onto our screens while we’re trying to work on mods. Even throughout these difficult circumstances, the community is working had to bring their ideas and visions to the game and we’re happy to show you what has happened in the month of February! So let’s close those curtains and get this Wrench started, we have quite a lot of things to show you.

Join us on the Community Modding Discord where you can join discussions and meet the modding community. It’s a great place to share your ideas and passions with like-minded people that will happily help you create something awesome.

Official Squad Modding Hub Server

Often requested and, thankfully, now we were able to finally do it. We have an official Modding Hub Server that is running your modded content 24/7! It shall forever be known as the “Squad Modding Hub Official” and you can directly connect here: steam://connect/play.squadmodding.com:27165, or use the IP address: play.squadmodding.com:27165 (The 27165 is technically the port number, but you get the idea.)

Do you have any suggestions regarding what to run on it? Hit us up at the Modding Hub: we’re there to listen to you! And while we’re talking about our server, what are you doing on Saturdays? We have a nice, weekly event for every mod lover and mod lover in the making: our Squad Modding Roundup! This is where you can play some curated mods in an event with other squaddies. Keep an eye out for the announcements and get all the files at www.squadmodding.com.

Finnish Defence Forces Update by FDFMod

The team behind the Finnish Defence Forces is hard at work to bring this faction to Squad. Weapons are already starting to find their way into the engine and they’re currently building some maps. Shown here is a 2x2km map based on a real-life location, it’s called Rautjärvi. They are also working on custom buildings and foliage to populate the maps with appropriate content. Mennä!

A special shout-out to the folks from the last developer chat that were looking for maps and forces outside of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Helicopter Mod v6 Update by Heedicalking/MF Cool

One community favourite just received a nice update: the helicopter mod just introduced the Russian Ka-52 “Alligator”. Being equipped with a semi-rigid 30mm cannon, two side-mounted rocket pods, 14 ATGMs and a FLIR thermal camera it surely brings a lot to the battlefield. To counter this the M163 Vulcan anti-air platform was also added in this update!

Karkand City by FAR-STAN

A lot of people in the gaming community have fond memories of “Strike at Karkand,” a map that was originally featured in Battlefield 2 and made its way into later iterations of the Battlefield series as well. FAR-STAN has set out to do a faithful recreation of this map and it’s going quite well. In the future, he plans to continue working on the map and creating some custom assets to really bring back the city of Karkand to SQUAD — sure to be a superior city combat experience.

Foreign Legion Mod by Squad Mod France

Still hard at work, we get another update from the Foreign Legion Mod. This time we can see some progress on their map from community member Legion, and some screens of the Renault GBC 180 which will be their second logistics truck and can carry more supplies than the TRM 2000, but comes at a higher ticket cost. As always you can also check out their website for their full progress reports.

Battle of Skorpo – Uskedalen Expansion by Zeno

The Battle of Skorpo has undergone a lot of changes during its time in development and is now being updated with an entirely new gameplay area based on the real-life location of Uskedalen. The mainland section of the level will feature tranquil villages, windy mountains, lush valleys and raging rivers. New layers available are AAS and AAS Infantry. Together with the updated Invasion layer and soon to come: Search & Destroy game mode, there will be endless ways to play this map!

Sarau Desert by Noxxid3

Already introduced in last month’s edition of The Wrench, Noxxid3 didn’t stop working on his map inspired by Kashan Desert from Project Reality. A road network was defined and the landscape was decorated with some vegetation. You can follow the development of the map in the forum thread, development is moving quite quickly!

Special Forces by r0tzbua

While still working on putting the last few changes on the snow white (without a single dwarf) winter factions, r0tzbua was inspired by OWI’s own ChanceBrahh to do an AN/PEQ-15 attachment for the M4 rifle. After that was done (even though it’s just a cosmetic thing and doesn’t work yet) the idea came up to work on a SOPMOD kit for the rifle. When the NT4 suppressor and the Spectre scope was on it didn’t seem very far-fetched to play around with night vision. That’s where we’re at right now, complete with the awesome suppressed M4 sounds by TheSCRUB.

SQUAD MOD Combat Evolved by The SMCE Team

This fine team consisting of like-minded people from the Modding Community have set themselves quite the formidable goal of creating a total conversion of Squad in the Halo universe. While we would all love to blow through hordes of enemies as the Master Chief, we can all agree that it wouldn’t be quite a balanced multiplayer experience. The SMCE team thinks the same and were mostly inspired by the elite Marine ODST gameplay of Halo 3: ODST. We are really looking forward to what they come up with!

1P63 – Russian Optic by Assi

Some new optics for the poor optic-deprived Russian faction are in the works, and Assi started right up with the 1p63 for the AK-74M. Originally starting as a practice model he decided to implement it into Squad to check out how the weapon and attachment system works. You can check out the submission in the workshop already over here.

Game Modes by Virus.exe

Quite known in the Modding community for his excellent work on game modes and more, Virus.exe is at it again with a new release: a Territorial Domination mode which places objectives all over the map and lets the team fight over territories (as the name might imply). Depending on the number of held territories (each 5% of map control gains 1 ticket per minute) a team gains tickets and whichever team outpaces the other by 200 tickets first wins the match. The mod comes packed with a proof of concept INS vs. MIL layer on Al-Basrah which is loaded with highly mobile technicals and only little-armoured vehicles, check it out on the Steam Workshop! Additional thanks here to Sacretis for the Territory Domination icon.

The Destruction game mode which we talked about last month has received some updates throughout February. Areas with active objectives are now shown on the map and the construction of deployables in a 10m radius around them. The Gorodok layer received some balance changes and the Chora layer has been updated for Squad v10. If you haven’t already played it, get it from the Steam Workshop, it’s a lot of fun! Some thanks and credits go out to Rincewind for helping with a map painting system for objective areas, and Assi for the new weapon cache models.

Forest Map Concept by Marv

Quite a name in the community, Marv is known for working on multiple visually stunning maps. He also released Agrabah, which is on the Steam Workshop already. This new map takes us from the desert and directly into a dark and eerie European forest which makes us afraid of monsters jumping out behind every tree. Looking forward to it!

That’s all for this month people! We hope you enjoyed what we are cooking in the community and you have as much fun as we do. If you didn’t quite make it into this month’s deadline, fear not! We’re taking submissions for the next month already, just use this Wrench submission form.

Offworld out.