Rename your country - Ironman Compatible!

Have you ever found yourself wanting to change the name of your country in game? Perhaps you started as the remnants of a great empire and now that you have gained all of its lands and reforged it you feel underwhelmed by your original name? Or perhaps your country has undergone vast changes in terms of culture and governance and you wish to change its name to reflect this?

This guide aims to help those of us keen on a little role-play to understand simple mod-making in order to rename countries in game. The best part is as this mod will only affect localisation, it will not break ironman saves allowing you to gain achievements!

Introduction

As stated in the description, the purpose of this guide is to show those of you who like a little role-play or historical accuracy in your games to change the names of countries at will just as you can with provinces.

In the past I have done games where I start as the one province minors of Hisn Kayfa and the Knights of Rhodes and eventually reform the Ayyubid and Latin Empires respectively. The Ayyubid is clearly recognised by the conditions for its achievement, while the Latin Empire is recognised in the crusader mission tree - and yet, neither can have its name changed in game the same way uniting Islam or forming the Kingdom of God does.



Since I learned this trick I have found roleplaying in eu4 far more enjoyable because no longer are you stuck with the same name you began with and you can easily reflect changes in government, culture and status.

So this guide is for those of you like me, it does not take long, it is easy, and as I said, it is completely ironman compatible, so let's get going!

The Set-up

Alright, I have set this up so it is step-by-step and hopefully perfectly clear what I am doing:

1. Open your eu4 launcher and navigate the "All installed mods" tab on the left

2. Once there, click the "mod tools" button at the top.

3. This will open a dialogue box in which you want to click "create mod".

4. From here you want to fill in the details of your mod. I decided I will rename the country of Toulouse to Occitania (which is a game I have done before) as the flag of Toulouse is also the flag of Occitania and the cultural capital of the state.

Hence, my mod is called "Occitania" and mt directory is "mod/occitania" - these are up to you, but keep them clear so you understand what you're doing.

In version, simply put the current version you are playing on. Localisation mods are unlikely to ever be broken by an update so this isn't all that important.

Finally, tags are completely irrelevant unless you plan to upload your mod to the workshop. Just select whatever.

Once this is done, click "create mod".

5. Now close the next dialogue box unless you want to upload your mod, in which case its pretty self-explanatory. Also close the launcher at this point.

The modding

Now we get to the actual modding part.

1. Navigate your eu4 mod folder in Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\mod. Here you will see all of your mods and you should have the mod you just created as a folder. Open this folder.

2. Leave this folder open in it there should be nothing but a descriptor.mod file. Now navigate the main eu4 directory. This will be in your program files (wherever you installed steam) under Steam\steamapps\common\Europa Universalis IV. From there locate the folder called "localisation" and inside it find the file called countries_l_english.yml. If you are playing EU4 in any of the other languages, then find that file instead. What you want to do now is COPY this file.

3. Now return to your mod directory, and inside your mod folder create a folder called "localisation" to mirror that in the eu4 directory. It is important you spell this correctly so the game recognises it.

4. Paste the file you copied form the eu4 directory inside the new folder.

5. Now using a text editor (ideally Notepad++ or Sublime Text - this is what I am using but regular notepad should also work) open this file for editing. Using the ctrl+f "find" function locate the country you want to rename.
Note: Some countries are not located in this file. For some reason paradox has messed up and the localisations for some nations are located in the file called "text_l_ebglish.yml". The process is the same, the file is simply different. I haven't looked into all the countries so its possible there is some others in other files too, but the far majority is in the correct file.

6. Rename the country as you wish - do not alter anything else. if the formatting is broken, the game will not recognise it.

7. Now do the same but locate the adjective for this country.

8. Again, rename it as you wish, taking care to not alter the formatting or tags.

9. Once this is done, simply save and close the file, open the Eu4 launcher and navigate your playset where you'd normally select your mods. The mod should already be there, I like to disable and re-enable it just to be sure.

10. Now in-game, start an ironman campaign, and boom.

Conclusion

Here you go! At first this may all seem a little daunting, but once you do it you will know how to do it forever opening a whole new level of immersion to your games.

The graphic mod I am using is called Duck;s Map Overhaul Modpack and is available in the workshop:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1926948425

I hope the guide was clear, if something wasn't please let me know. I'm thinking of doing a similar guide but for flags some time soon as this also is ironman compatible. Either way, thank you for reading, I hope you have a good day!

Burned.

[Fudrick37]

Hi ! I've a lil question : I wanna renamed Spain when formed with Aragon as Major Partner but without keeping this new name when Castile forms Spain. Which folders must I modify ?

[ᐯIƆ ➬ (Big Birb)]

I don't think this works with custom nations, or at least I tried and it didn't work.

[FastJD123]

this dosent work

[Hugh de Salle]

Excellent guide worked 100% I can now play the Ayyubids instead of Hisn Kayfa.

[drainedyayo]

i tried this it didnt work at all for me. is this outdated?

[Aelfric]

your guide has some good logic. i wonder if it could be improved by saying the custom mod phase is optional? it'd look like less workif it said i could edit my core game files as an option, and maybe work my way up to custom mod eventually

[Burned]

@id unfortunately as far as I know, EU4 doesn't have the same user interface modding capabilities as games liked HOI4 or CK3. While I am by no means an experienced mod maker, I don't know of a way I could take a text input from the player and translate it into the game from in-game.

And the main reason I made this guide was because this is ironman and achievement compatible, a mod like that would certainly not be as it would require editing other mechanics not just the localisation files. So unfortunately I don't think it would be possible even if I knew how to.

[Aelfric]

cant you just make the mod for us? looks like a lot of work to do myself :(

[MikiK]

Great work! The potential this has for RPing the exact nation you have in mind, and forming new ones, is definitely something I wish Iron Man had more of, even though there are more things to form these days. Great article and keep up the good work, thanks for taking the time to put this out there.

[沉眠]

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