Terminology

The complete community development environment used to author PAYDAY 3 mods. Depending on context, this includes the custom Unreal Engine editor, the PAYDAY 3 project/stubs, CrimeForge, and supporting tooling.

The customized Unreal Engine 5.5.4 editor used by the modkit.

An asset that has already been cooked for the shipped game.

In this modkit, supported installed PAYDAY 3 cooked assets can be made visible to the editor as read-only development/reference content.

An asset created by the mod author and belonging to the mod.

This is different from PAYDAY 3 base-game content.

The editor tooling used for PAYDAY-specific mod creation workflows, templates, validation, forging, and related authoring tools. CrimeForge creates mods as Unreal plugins.

The PAYDAY 3 runtime mod loader/integration layer. PDML discovers and handles CrimeForge plugin mods installed under PAYDAY3/Mods/.

CrimeForge’s name for the cook and package operation. Forge cooks the assets that belong to the selected mod and packages only the content that mod should include.

PAYDAY3/Mods/ is the dedicated runtime location for normal CrimeForge/PDML mods. It is separate from PAYDAY 3’s own PAYDAY3/Content/Paks/ directory.

A packaging/asset-list mechanism used by the modding toolchain to control which content is included for a mod.

An editor-safe representation of a PAYDAY 3 gameplay object.

For systems that cannot safely or practically be authored directly from cooked game objects, CrimeForge can use proxies/placeholders that are resolved to the appropriate runtime objects in-game.

A mod asset intended to replace content at an existing PAYDAY 3 asset path.

New content introduced by a mod rather than replacing an existing base-game asset.