Modders have been given a herculean task this gen: to fix broken games released by AAA publishers. We expect indie games to release somewhat half-finished or with some rough spots around the edges, but typically paying premium price for an AAA title comes with expectations, such as optimization and stable performance. Well, PC gamers haven’t been treated to such a luxury when it comes to Capcom’s Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, and so it’s been left to modders to find a fix for the PC version of the game… and they have.

AsteriskAmpersand and Moonbunnie released a mod on May 21st, 2020 called the Performance Boost and Plugin Extender. It removes a lot of the junk code from Monster Hunter: World and vastly improves performance of the game on PC.

You can download the mod right now from over on the NexusMods page.

Before you can make use of the mod, however, you will need to download the Stracker’s Loader utility.

AsteriskAmpersand explains how the mod works on the description page, writing…

“Improves the game performance by removing swathes of extremely unoptimized code that is ultimately irrelevant to the game functioning. Also enables more advanced plugins to run properly.

The performance gain is most noticeable on CPU constrained systems (given the atrocious “multithreaded” code the game runs on, almost everyone is CPU constrained unless they are using a Threadripper).

Works by removing the unnecessary CRC Code which repeatedly checks in-game memory region for bit errors. However as this regions are never touched and the game just crashes when an error in the region is detected (making error detection ultimately pointless) this code is entirely unnecessary and just a detriment to performance (given it’s done repeatedly and checks for around 250KB regions 32 times per rotation it’s a massive waste of CPU usage). The plugin has been tested to be stable up to 20 consecutive hours of playtime (confirmed to be stable for that long, probably will be for much longer and even indefinitely).”

In plain ‘ole English, he removed a lot of code that caused unnecessary load on your CPU, and so with the CPU cycles freed up, it means less work is going into junk code and more into processing actual game content. Hence, higher and more stable frame-rates.

This works well with the HOOT mod, where IgniteHawk tweaked the weapons and motion values so that the game feels more balanced when performing certain attacks with specific weapons.

You can downlooad the HOOT (Hitstop and Other Obsessive Tweaks) mod from over on the NexusMods page.

(Thanks for the news tip Wondy Bergers)

(Main image courtesy of KLK Ultimate Armor Mod)