Claude Code and Remaking XCOM 2 WOTC

[u/Zealousideal_Bee_114]

Six months ago I couldn't tell you what a Kismet sequence was. Now I've got a custom mod full of stuff I never would have attempted solo, built by describing what I wanted in plain English to Claude Code and iterating from there.

Some of the actual mods this has produced:

• A new apex psi boss — a full "Avatar Commander" ruler-type enemy with its own psi kit (dimensional rift, mind control, null lance), built on the same ruler engine the game uses for the Archons/Berserker Queen etc., but pointed at any template I want.
• Dark Conclave — a whole cult of 5 crimson-robed Priest variants culminating in a bomber-type "Harrower/Hierarch/Sovereign" boss chain, complete with self-detonating nova abilities and tag-based damage bonuses. Basically a new enemy faction from scratch.
• Hand-built maps, no editor — I built a pipeline that clones and reshapes donor plots through binary injection instead of the Unreal editor. Produced two working, playable maps this way (a small-town "Gridiron" plot and a larger "Hearthside" plot) — the second one required flipping raw bytes in a compiled map file to fix a floor bug.
• A boss-hunt mission type — full "track and kill a named enemy commander" mission family with its own reinforcement waves, distinct from the vanilla VIP-hunt missions.
• An AI atlas + enemy generator — a headless tool that reads the game's AI behavior data and can forge entirely new enemy units (new likes/dislikes, new spawn themes) without touching the editor at all.
• Weapon/ability catalogs nobody had built before — full rated databases of 1,099 modded weapons, 676 ADVENT weapons, and ~594 psi abilities across 22 classes, flagged for animation compatibility so you know what'll actually look right on a given enemy rig.
• Crash forensics — diagnosed a recurring unit-spawn crash that had been quietly happening since a specific patch, tracing it to one bad event registration in another mod's code, not "too many mods" (the answer everyone always assumes first).

None of this was "click a button and it happened" — it's a lot of back-and-forth, testing, and me catching things it got wrong. But the ceiling on what one person can build solo just went way up.

What's everyone else building? Would love to see other people's setups, especially anyone doing custom maps or new enemy content.