Thief 3 Setup and Modding Guide

This guide will help you get your copy of Thief 3: Deadly Shadows up and running with the latest and greatest mods to make your gameplay experience the best it can be. You'll also learn how to play Fan Missions too.

This guide is currently a Work In Progress!

This guide is slowly being built. Please give me some time to work on it. Right now it is fairly incomplete but more stuff will be added soon.

Let's Get Started

OK so, I'm going to assume that you have Thief 3 installed on your computer right now. Possibly in the Program Files or Program Files (x86) folder. This is fine as the game does not write anything into that folder, it tends to put its save files in the Documents and Settings folder.

It's usually best to run the game at least once before starting this so the tools we use can find the files they need as they are generated by the game on first-run.














Thief 3 can chug along like this pretty well, but you may find things like V-Sync and the lockpicking don't work anymore, or the lack of 16:9 resolutions, and other annoying problems.

Let's fix all of this with one huge patch for Thief 3 called the Sneaky Upgrade!

The Thief 3 "Sneaky Upgrade"

A lot of mods for Thief 3 have come and gone over the years, The Sneaky Upgrade rolls everything into one huge unofficial patch for the game that will fix everything you could want. It comes with a tweaking tool so you can enable/disable things and change whatever you want at the push of a button!

The Sneaky Upgrade on TTLG[www.ttlg.com] - Current Version - 1.1.10

This guide will cover the "Fat" version of the pack as it contains the most mods.

Go ahead and download the pack now. Double-Click on it, go through the process of installing the pack and point it to your Thief 3 steam installation when prompted. Once installation is complete, you will have a new set of Desktop Icons.

• The first one is your standard Steam Desktop item.
  
• The second one is a new EXE that is provided with the Sneaky Upgrade. You can play both normal Thief 3 and the Upgraded Thief 3 at the same time if you wish.
  
• The third is the FM Selector tool which will allow you to install and play user-made fan missions.
  
• The fourth is the Sneaky Tweaker, the most important tool. This will allow you to customize Thief 3 to your hearts content.

With all this now done and the pack installed, it's time to open the Sneaky Tweaker and get customizing our game!

The SneakyTweaker Tool

Go ahead and start up the SneakyTweaker tool. The layout is pretty easy to understand. You will be able to disable and enable anything you see fit here, all nicely arranged but could be confusing for someone who is not very savvy to these sorts of things. Let's take a look at the first page...

Overview

This is where we will enable the big mods! Have a careful read of things before proceeding.

"Collective Texture Pack - Textures" by John P.

John P used to host these textures on his website before it went down. They are some of the nicest, if not the only, set of textures you can find for Thief 3. They are disabled by default but enabling them is just a check box away.

Here are some side-by-side comparison shots of the first training mission in 4K

                          Original Game                                                       John P. Texture Pack
                          Original Game                                                       John P. Texture Pack

Quite a difference in quality! They stick very close to the original style so these are great to have enabled.

"The Minimalist Project" by New Horizon

If you want more of a Thief Gold / 2 feel to your menus, on-screen HUD and smaller elements of your game experience, this mod is for you!
This mod also changes around a lot of the default difficulty levels. Now, all the difficulty levels set the NPCs at very high awareness levels, the player will take much more damage and some difficulties demand you complete levels under a certain time limit.

By enabling this mod, you'll get a number of new things including:

A new start screen!



New pre-mission screen with smaller fonts, lower brightness and altered graphics!



Smaller, traditional font on the loading screens!



And a new in-game HUD with a Thief Gold / 2 syle health meter. The weapon / item selection now makes no noise and is pushed further to the edge of the screen keeping things tidy.



Not only that but a few sounds (such as the loot pickup sound) has been reverted back to the previous Thief games as well as the colour of the 'frob' over items when you are close enough to pick them up. The loot 'glint' is now darker and harder to see.


Pretty slick! If you like it, it's just one click away!

"Collective Texture Pack - Menu, Header and Loading Screens" by John P.

Note: This mod will clash with the Minimalist Project if you have it enabled at the same time. Read the information about 'Load Order' provided below the check-boxes to get an idea of what to do to avoid conflicts.

This mod is more of a miscellaneous bunch of smaller texture enhancements

This mod gives us a new start screen and a new higher resolution "Thief" logo on it.


The loot 'frob' colour is also different in this mod, turning it a light brown instead of the default blue.

"Briefing Videos" by mensch

Thief 3 did away with the nicely hand-drawn cutscenes that Thief Gold and 2 are well known for. Instead it has a boring old text dump on the screen whilst Stephen Russell sounds like he's just reading inside a recording studio.

This mod overlays the spoken text over, much more traditional looking, cutscenes. Give them a try, you'll get one as soon as you start the first mission!

"Thief 3 Gold" by Beleg Cúthalion

Thief 3 was designed for the Xbox, using the Deus Ex 2 engine. The pitiful amount of RAM the Xbox had meant that missions had to be split into parts. This also meant that the PC version got crippled in the process.

Thief 3 Gold is the REAL meat of this mod, some clever taffers have been very busy and they have made some HUGE changes; They've combined and stitched up the original game levels so that there are no more loading 'portals' inside missions!











The screenshots above are from Castle Rutherford. If you've played the game before, you may remember that in these locations, you'd have to walk into a huge doorway of fog that would then ask you to change levels. As you can see, this has been completely removed!

Sadly, this is not possible to achieve with The City's streets. The City is simply too big and complex for it to be done without a huge chance of something breaking.

More Coming Soon...

[aphek8]

Is there any way to use launch options in steam in order to boot up upgraded version? like (-sneakyupgrade.exe)?

[Valorin]

I created a texture pack building on John P.'s textures to get the feel of the game closer to the original. Especially the windows were much brighter and very clean in John P.'s version, so I added a lot of soot and gloom to make The City look more gritty again. Also exchanged a few textures with free internet resources which looked very different from the original.

If interested, look here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/thief3/mods/5

[Cenotaph]

It works, but you need to run the game once first then the registry keys are written.

[Captain Pentium]

This used to work on my Windows 8.1, but now with a different PC it can't read the registry key and no amount of reinstalling solved the issue. F*ing shame, this was the only way to play the game.

[Markedone]

I love this, but ai do have an issue with the bow draw, and the mouse sensitivity being way too high (ill check the configs to lower the sensitivity).

My biggest issue is when an arrow is drawn it is stuck in Garrett's arm then it snaps to the reticule on the bow. is there any fix for this?

[LoneWolf]

I guess my question is do ALL external mod work on steam or is it better if I get them on GoG? I know on GoG they will work because they don't screw with the installation directory/files like stem does with their games.

[LoneWolf]

So these patches/texture packs can be downloaded and installled from outside Steam? (and for Thief 1 and 2 as well) Im asking because I tried using an external texture pack for another steam game once, and it just fked it all up and made the game unstartable.

[Valorin]

The sneaky upgrade is absolutely perfectly great!
Merges everything you want to mod in this game while leaving options to turn stuff on and off later. Love it.

[MarkyMark]

Installs and runs great. if you having trouble it must be an issue with your PC or graphics card. The only thing i can't work out is how to lock pick doors? Im sure there was an extra graphic on the original game that showed you if you was close to completing the lock pick or not :/

[dubesor]

Sneaky is so fucking shit, first of all all virus software, including windows flags it as MALWARE, HPDefender Adware, secondly it doesn't fucking work. It will always crash when you go into the game, while vanilla install works perfectly fine except I can't do lockpicking. I simply want a fix for lockpicking and no other shenanigans. Tried Vsync, does nothing. Tried Framerate limited to 60hz in both windows as well as Nvidia settings = nothing.