THE WRENCH – October 2022

Southeast Asia isn’t really a focus in many first person shooters. So how about we change that up?

“War in the Southeast” (or WSE for short) is a mod that’s meant to bring a Southeast Asian theatre of war into Squad. The mod will ship with 2 factions, a semi-fictional “GreenFor” faction named “USEAM”, a military that was created by combining the militaries of Southeast Asia specifically to deal with the Southeast Asian Insurgents (SEAI). An insurgent group that’s well equipped with surplus Chinese and American weapons. Both classes will have their own unique quirks and it’ll be worth your time.

Our mod will also be shipped with a new Urban map, so for those who like fighting in the city, we hope you enjoy

If all this sounds interesting to you, the discord will be linked below. We are currently looking for 3d modellers that can create weapons and character models, so if you can do that we’ll be happy to have you on board. But even if you can’t do that, you’re still welcome to join. We hope you all like the models we created

So come join the War in the Southeast. You won’t regret it.

The Squad you know, new layers. No sweeping balance changes, Hawks Layer Pack is very much a Vanilla Squad experience.

Hawks Layer Pack offers over 120 distinct brand new RAAS layers that utilize one of two custom-made RAAS selection algorithms.

There’s the classic Hawks Layer Pack RAAS (formerly know as GRAAS) which offers a more consistent experience similar to Squad’s RAAS where the number of points is consistent, but what changes is there is a lot more variability and different lane-jumping algorithm than vanilla, which more consistently avoids jumps across an entire map. “The next point makes sense”.

Dynamic Direction is a mod all about thinking strategically, coordinating, and acting fast to win the day in a hardcore, milsim-style sandbox! While DD is centered around the Occupation game mode’s player-made objectives and team loadout changes, it also features custom content, like new lighting layers, maps from our fellow creators, and custom factions!

Occupation is a King of the Hill style game mode that allows players to choose their objectives and how best to achieve them. In conventional vs conventional matchups, players fight over control of the AO by taking ground and assaulting enemy FOBs. In conventional vs irregular matchups, conventional players have to hunt down enemy caches, while irregular forces can choose to defend their caches and ambush the attacking enemy, or make attacks of their own. You can learn more about Occupation through this video, produced by our friend LawnDartz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7oEzhg6lg0

The latest custom faction to come to DD is the Afghan Special Battalion, a unique blend of insurgent and conventional factions in Squad now. Unlike the ill-equipped fighters that preceded them, the Special Battalion is much more capable of going toe-to-toe with modern foes in NATO or from the East. (Screens courtesy of Santee).

The Special Battalion uses a blend of Western and Eastern equipment, ranging from PKMs, to tricked-out AKs with ACOGs attached, to M16s and SAWs. In keeping with the spirt of using anything they can scrounge up, AFGN also has RPG-7s, LAWs, M203s, and IEDs in their arsenal.

Like their handheld gear, the Special Battalion has a good mix of ex-Soviet and ex-American vehicles at their disposal. Whether it’s unarmored, DShK-mounted Humvees, a BMP-2 in a fresh coat of paint, or an Mi-8, they have the mobility and firepower needed to win the day.

Want to see more? We’ve got you covered! There’s more to see in DD, like miniguns strapped to Blackhawks, air assault layers, tank layers, night layers with the streetlights on, and more! And if that’s *still* not enough, we have more custom factions and gear in the pipeline. See it all and stay up-to-date through our Discord, Steam page, and development Trello (listed below).

We can’t wait to see you in the AO!

The Liareng Islands is a new map I’ve been working on, featuring a series of small fictional islands set in southeast Asia. The map will feature brutal close quarters jungle warfare, broken up by perilous island-hopping. If all goes to plan Liareng Islands will hopefully offer a hitherto unique experience, with an uncompromising focus on amphibious and airborne combined arms combat.

A *very* early version of the map is close to completion (barred only by a few perplexing issues and a lack of free time), and will feature only one island, likely only suitable for Skirmish layers. Should performance allow it, I then intend to extend the map to *at least* three addition islands (although ATGM:s will probably have to be disabled at this point, unfortunately).

Some of the first islands current POI:s include:

If you have any fun ideas for POI:s, or other considerations, feel free to hit me up on the Modding Discord 🙂

Greetings from the Squad: Vietnam team, it’s been a while.

A quick update on the state of the mod as you haven’t seen much of it recently. First off while not to a schedule yet, you’ll be seeing more teasers and content on the mod now as we have more that we are happy to show. We were in a content draught due to the type of work going on behind the scenes recently so apologies for the large gap in updates.

Now, I don’t want to spoil too much but we have been holding off showing gunplay until the assets were finished and polished up but as those are coming together we’re going to start showing them off. Also, some of our closer community may have realised that you haven’t seen much of our Mekong Delta map. It’s been a huge undertaking to build not just a new map but a totally new environment to what’s currently present in the base game. It’s seen multiple devs, multiple reworks and new tech made to improve on quality. Unfortunately, it’s still going to take some time before it’s finished. (If you have experience in level design & UE4 we’re still looking for additional LDs.) To ensure we don’t delay the release of our mod further, we decided to take the base-game Kokan map and reskin it for a Vietnam setting. What started as a “quick reskin” with new foliage is now a total overhaul but great progress has been made and we look forward to showing you that very soon.

That short update out of the way, we have some goodies to show off. We wanted to make sure that the models we have made to bring Squad into the Vietnam war era have variation instead of them being copy&paste clones. One way we do this is by using Material Instance Constants. We can procedurally change many parameters of the texture, such as the colour or the metallicness of the paint. This way, we can derive limitless variations from a single set of master textures without the need of importing new textures to the game, effectively cutting down memory and hard drive space. We’ve included examples using our Renault 4CV below.

The M1 Carbine that we’ve previously shown on our discord got a rework to update and bring it in line with our other assets.

Our M16 has seen many reworks since the model was initially made but with things now being in a more polished finished state we’re happy to show it. The M16A1 along with its bipod variation use our original models, animations and even sounds so please enjoy

For more updates and sneak peeks head over to our discord where we’ll be showing lots more very soon.

The Bundeswehr Mod Team is back with some impressive progress to show! Most of their basic weapons are finished and in the process of UE integration and animation. The same is true for most of their vehicles – the Wiesel weapons carrier already drives and is gunning! Also their map project “Fulda Gap: Battle for Zillbach” made great progress. They impress with unique German level assets, such as NATO trenches, cold war era bunkers and medieval wooden framed houses. They present new 3D scanned plants and a deep German forest to fight in, with trees providing cover from helicopters and drones.

In other news, their Mod Map Narva+ comes with a new flooded and amphibious warfare layer. The water level is lower than the vanilla version of it, while the bridges are high enough to allow boats to pass. Of course the destructible bridges still work and became even more important to secure! Visit their discord to get more infos or help them with their projects.

They are currently looking for help in animations, video editing and leveldesign.

Their newest blog update should be up soon too!

Squad Ukraine is a mod that adds Armed Forces of Ukraine to Squad, created by the Squad Ukraine Community. Current mod already contains some equipment of Ukrainian Forces of years 2015-2019. We are also planning to add Ukrainian Forces version of years 2019-2022. Also there’s a big custom map called Shyrokyne (reference to a real village Shyrokyne in Ukraine).

The mod contains retextured/modified vanilla assets (weapons and other equipment, vehicles, decorations, maps) as well as completely new ones, made by the Squad Ukraine Community.

We have many veterans and military experts. They are helping us to create a realistic look and feel as well as adjust weapons and vehicles to their real parameters.