[!WARNING]
Copies of this app are going around. Renamed builds of Dota 2 Mod Manager are handed out
and sold as other people's launchers, with no source code and no credit. The real one is free,
has no paid version and never asks for your Steam login. Do not trust a launcher that shows no
source code, names nobody it is built on, wants a subscription or a payment, or makes you sign
in. Get it only from dota2modmanager.com or this repository's
releases.
How to tell the real one.
[!NOTE]
Not affiliated with Valve. Every mod here is client-side: nobody else sees them, and no other
player's game is touched. VPK mods and hero items from the builder never touch Dota's own files.
Looks for default items, item size and mods' effects need the item table, which asks once before
it edits them and reverts byte for byte.
Why not just copy the files yourself? You can, and people do. What the app adds is
everything after that: switching a mod off before a match without deleting it, a weather effect
or a courier your account never bought drawn on your own screen, a setup you send as one link,
and a game that still works after a Dota patch.
What it does
The mod manager and modding toolkit for Dota 2: install mods from the community catalog, or build your own from the game's files.
Make your own mods with AI
The repository carries a skill for AI coding assistants: everything an assistant needs to build a
Dota 2 mod from a description. Send this to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any agent that can run
commands on your computer:
Set up Dota 2 modding for me: https://dota2modmanager.com/ai/setup.md
It clones this repository, installs the skill, checks which tools you have and asks before
installing the rest. Then ask for what you want: "make Necrophos' spells blood red", "give me
Terrorblade's arcana", "a Ghostface mask and a hooded cloak", "he should pull a knife on spawn".
The assistant reads the game's files, compiles with Valve's Workshop Tools, checks the result with
the mod doctor and hands you a VPK to drag into the app.
In Claude Code it also installs as a plugin:
/plugin marketplace add dota2modmanager/dota2-mod-manager
/plugin install dota2-modding@dota2modmanager
The skill lives in skills/dota2-modding: SKILL.md, references for each
kind of mod, helper scripts for Blender and Python, and the npm run modkit commands it drives.
We wrote it down while building a full custom Necrophos set this way. The guide for people:
Make Dota 2 mods with AI.
Install
- Download Dota 2 Mod Manager Setup — direct link, always the latest version
- Run it. The app installs, creates a shortcut and starts
- It finds Dota on its own. No launch options, no Steam properties to edit
On Linux the same app ships as an
AppImage:
chmod +x it and run it.
[!IMPORTANT]
Windows will call the publisher unknown, because the installer carries no paid signature.
Click More info, then Run anyway. Every release is built from this source by a
public workflow
rather than uploaded from anybody's desktop, and the build log for the exact file you
downloaded is open to read.
Every file on a release is listed with its SHA-256 in SHA256SUMS, and the release workflow signs
that list through Sigstore. To check that a download came out of that workflow, with the GitHub CLI:
gh attestation verify Dota-2-Mod-Manager-Setup.exe --repo dota2modmanager/dota2-mod-manager
Or against the list alone, in a folder holding both files:
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
On Windows without the GitHub CLI, Get-FileHash Dota-2-Mod-Manager-Setup.exe in PowerShell prints
the hash to compare with its line in SHA256SUMS. Releases published before this check existed
have no SHA256SUMS.
How it works
Nothing is injected into Dota's process, and no file of the game is opened while it runs.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
