The best Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord mods

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord mods have already appeared by the dozens, giving you new ways to customize and personalize your experience in the Early Access medieval sandbox RPG. 

Below you'll find the best Bannerlord mods we've seen so far. Some tweak and change the gameplay, others improve the look of the world or characters, and one adds a developer console to Bannerlord so you can easily input commands. Have you ever wished Bannerlord had dismemberment? Modders have you covered.

Remember to read each mod's page completely—there may be specific installation instructions, and some mods require you to start a new campaign before they will work. Back up your files and saved games, and remember that updates to Bannerlord, which is still in Early Access, may prevent some mods from working in the future. We'll be updating this list as new mods appear.

Gameplay mods

Bannerlord Tweaks: This is a handy collection of improvements and changes, including an increase of the amount of renown you receive from battles and the rewards gained from tournaments, a raise to the stamina cap on crafting and a skill experience multiplier, a bonus to party size based on your leadership and steward skill, and lots of other useful tweaks for everything from settlements to sieges to castle buildings. There's lots of good stuff here.

Xorberax's Cut Through Everyone: Cleaving into a crowd of baddies and only hitting a single guy makes little sense, so this mod lets your swings penetrate through multiple targets while considering armor.

Dismemberment: It doesn't get much simpler than this. With this mod, your fatal strikes to the head have a good chance of triggering a decapitation. 

Detailed Character Creation: While Bannerlord's character creation tools are already impressively robust, this mod grants you additional options, such as setting your character's weight, age, and muscular build.

Hideout Player Party Limit Removed: Allows you to bring your entire army to attack bandit hideouts instead of just a few members—very useful in the mid-to-late game to tackle those ultra-tough hideouts.

Smith Forever: This module removes the stamina cost for smithing, refining, and smelting, which means you can keep on working for as long as you have materials to craft with.

Gay Marriage: This mod removes the sex check when you begin a romance, letting you woo and marry characters even if they're the same sex as your character. The same restrictions apply—your desired partner must be unmarried and you can't already be related to them.

Mixed Gender Troops: No reason for men to have all the fun on the battlefield. This customizable mod adds a mix of women soldiers to every faction and soldier type in Bannerlord. It can be configured to apply to only certain types of units depending on your preferences.

Fire Lord: Turn up the heat with this mod that adds fire arrows, flaming swords, and burning axes to your arsenal. 

Calradia at War (Custom Spawns): This meaty mod adds 21 new minor factions, complete with random encounters. 

Cheer Mod: You know how your soldiers give a hearty, uplifting cheer after a battle? Now you can join them. Lift your sword and raise your voice with a celebratory scream. Raaaar!

Yell to Inspire: If cheering after battle isn't enough, you can actually inspire your troops in the midst of battle with a hearty yell. It's an actual morale-boosting ability that has a cooldown, and it can convince enemies on the brink of retreat to flee, as well as rally your own troops if they've begun to retreat.

Buy Patrols: Increase you village management potential by forming squads of villagers to patrol the land. You'll have to pay them wages but they'll help keep bandits from raiding your resources.

Fast Dialogue: Bannerlord has a heck of a lot of loading screens—just entering into dialogue with villagers, caravans, lords, and bandits throws up a loading screen to both get into and out of the conversation. This mod adds a new menu option for conducting conversations without having to do it face-to-face, thus skirting those extra loading screens.

Screamerlord: If you really want to get immersed in Bannerlord, this mod lets you use your own voice to give commands to your troops. Using a speech recognition tool called VoiceAttack, you can direct your troops by speaking (yelling!) into a microphone. The free version of VoiceAttack gives you 20 commands, but if you pony up for the premium edition you'll get 50. 

Visual mods

Just Let Me Play: This mod lets you skip the tutorial and all the main missions so you can get to the good sandbox-y stuff faster. Some players have even reported better performance and quicker loading screens since plenty of missions don't need launching.

NPC Revamp: Currently a work in progress, this mod is improving the appearances of Bannerlord's NPCs using the character creation tools. It's not attempting to make everyone beautiful, but give them more character, make them look grittier, tougher, and better. You can even copy the face codes and apply them to your own character.

BannerEditor Enhancer: If you're gonna be a Bannerlord, you're gonna want an attractive banner. This mod greatly expands the color palate giving you additional options in the banner creation tool.

Dro's Color Correction: Spruces up the colors, providing deeper greens, richer sunsets, and crisper colors in general.

Invisible Helmet: You spent all the time in the character creator, so why should you hide your face? This mod removes your helmet while still keeping the armor bonus intact.

Utilities

Bannerlord Cheats: If you've been conquering the world using Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord cheats, then this could be a lifesaver. This mod packages all existing cheats into a convenient menu with toggles and meters so you can easily customize them how you wish.

Developer Console: When installed, it gives you access to a developer console by pressing Ctrl + the tilde key (~). This will allow you input the console commands you can find here, which can be used to add money to your character, gain levels, add soldiers to your party, increase your skills, and lots more.

Intro Disabler: Look, it's a nice intro with a glowing hot sword being stamped by a hammer and a bunch of logos. And it's honestly not even a long intro. But do you need to see it every time you start a game? Probably not. This disables it.

Vortex: Vortex isn't a Bannerlord mod, its the mod installer and manager of Nexus Mods. I'm including it here because it supports Bannerlord and it's an extremely useful tool for getting all your mods installed and keeping them updated.