Main way: Steam Workshop version

After installing Warband on your Mac, clicking Subscribe, and waiting for the big download to finish, the mod should be technically installed, if the Warband engine worked as intended we shouldn't have to do any of the following steps:

a) FIXING WARBAND

1. Open the «Go» menu in the Finder and select «Utilities», then click on the «Terminal» icon.
   
   • We will go line by line, just copy-paste the various commands in the Terminal and press Enter. I will explain what it does first to avoid looking sketchy.
   
   
2. Fix the garbled font and the collision bodies so that you can actually hit baddies. Just paste this in the Terminal window and press Enter:
   
   sh <<EOF && sh -c "# swy: zsh in catalina+ doesn't support inline comments: apple.stackexchange dot com/a/405317" # swy: needed for sed to stop complaining about the wholy unsupported hexadecimal literals export LANG=C export LC_ALL=C # swy: go into the game's binary folder cd "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Mount and Blade"."app/Contents/MacOS" # swy: turn their ../../.. hack into the harmless .//.//./ without changing the length of the string sed -i '' 's|\.\./\.\./\.\.|\.//\.//\./|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: fix the game looking up the correct Data folder via Info.plist bundle manifest; go figure sed -i '' -E 's|(</dict>)| \\ '$'\t''<!-- swy: tell SDL2 to read files out of the .app bundle; and do it properly --> \\ '$'\t''<key>SDL_FILESYSTEM_BASE_DIR_TYPE</key> \\ '$'\t''<string>parent</string> \\ \1|' ../Info.plist # swy: turn GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST (0x2701) into GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR (0x2703) to avoid the harsh mip texture transitions # 100903763 ba 01 27 00 00 MOV EDX,0x2701 # 1009037bd ba 01 27 00 00 MOV EDX,0x2701 # --- # BA 01 27 00 00 -> BA 03 27 00 00 sed -i '' $'s|\xBA\x01\x27|\xBA\x03\x27|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: SDL_GL_DEPTH_SIZE; Improve the depth buffer resolution/quality from 24 to 32 bits # BF 06 00 00 00 BE 18 00 00 00 -> BF 06 00 00 00 BE 20 00 00 00 # absolutely stupid sed workaround to avoid unsupported null bytes via capture group sed -i '' -E 's|'$'\xbf\x06''(...)'$'\xbe\x18''|'$'\xbf\x06''\1'$'\xbe\x20''|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: Note: this old macOS sed adds a harmless carriage return byte (0A) at the end of the file; doesn't matter echo "\n\033[42mDone, hopefully.\033[0m" EOF
3. Close the Terminal window.

That's it. Open Steam like your normally do and use Warband's Configure utility to change the selected mod to «The Last Days of the Third Age». If you followed this guide properly then the game should launch and reach to the main menu.

Automatic mod updates should work as normal, you only need to repeat these steps whenever the font breaks, so hopefully only when reinstalling the game.

Have fun in Middle-earth!

Alternative way: Manual mod installation

If you choose to install the mod *without* using the Steam Workshop, just make sure that the two latest .7z files from https://tldmod.github.io are already in your Downloads folder.

a) TEMPORARILY INSTALLING THE 7-ZIP EXTRACTOR

1. Open the «Go» menu in the Finder and select «Utilities», then click on the «Terminal» icon.
   
   • We will go line by line, just copy-paste the various commands in the Terminal and press Enter. I will explain what it does first to avoid looking sketchy.
   
   
2. This switches your Terminal to your temporary directory (the one that gets flushed every time you reboot), then downloads the 7za command-line utility (right from the 'Homebrew' package manager but without installing anything) and extracts it in that very same folder:
   
   • Don't worry, it's only a tiny, portable and self-contained program (called 7za) that will go away the next time you shutdown your Mac. They leave no trace behind.
   cd /tmp && curl -L 'ghcr.io''/v2/homebrew/core/p7zip/blobs/sha256:bea86999db7dee5f0cb78d3a72d875d822ec73ebb2a6e7d46cf27ae66243c645' -H 'Authorization: Bearer QQ==' -o p7zip.tar.gz && tar -xzvf p7zip.tar.gz 'p7zip/17.04/lib/p7zip/7za' && mv -f 'p7zip/17.04/lib/p7zip/7za' .

b) UNINSTALLING PREVIOUS TLD VERSIONS

1. Keep in mind that the paths shown here are for the default Steam Library game folder; so if you are installing Warband into a different disk drive or using the GOG variant you will have to adjust them accordingly.
   
   • For example, GOG by default installs it under '/Applications/Mount & Blade Warband/Mount and Blade.app' instead.
2. This opens Warband's «Modules» folder in the Finder so that you can delete any previous versions of the «TLD» folder on your own by right-clicking it and using «Move to Trash». If the folder isn't there let's just skip this step and proceed to the installation:
   
   open "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Modules/"

c) INSTALLING THE MOD

Next up we are going to extract the mod under «{game-root}/Modules/TLD/». Just ensure that the two latest .7z files (the standalone and the latest nightly patch) from https://tldmod.github.io are already conveniently stored in your Downloads folder and this will take care of the rest:

1. Let's switch to the Downloads folder, where the compressed files are.
   
   cd ~/Downloads
2. Extract the standalone TLD 3.6 release for Warband:
   
   /tmp/7za x -y -bb1 -o"$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Modules" TLD_3.6_wb.7z
3. Extract the latest Warband nightly patch (the one that comes with the latest updates) and, you guessed it, overwrite yet again:
   
   /tmp/7za x -y -bb1 -o"$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Modules" `find . -name 'TLD_3.6_wb_*' | sort -r -u | head -n 1`

d) FIXING WARBAND

The mod is now technically installed, if the Warband engine worked as intended we shouldn't have to do the following workaround:

1. Fix the garbled font and the collision bodies so that you can actually hit baddies. Just paste this in the Terminal window and press Enter:
   
   sh <<EOF && sh -c "# swy: zsh in catalina+ doesn't support inline comments: apple.stackexchange dot com/a/405317" # swy: needed for sed to stop complaining about the wholy unsupported hexadecimal literals export LANG=C export LC_ALL=C # swy: go into the game's binary folder cd "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Mount and Blade"."app/Contents/MacOS" # swy: turn their ../../.. hack into the harmless .//.//./ without changing the length of the string sed -i '' 's|\.\./\.\./\.\.|\.//\.//\./|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: fix the game looking up the correct Data folder via Info.plist bundle manifest; go figure sed -i '' -E 's|(</dict>)| \\ '$'\t''<!-- swy: tell SDL2 to read files out of the .app bundle; and do it properly --> \\ '$'\t''<key>SDL_FILESYSTEM_BASE_DIR_TYPE</key> \\ '$'\t''<string>parent</string> \\ \1|' ../Info.plist # swy: turn GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST (0x2701) into GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR (0x2703) to avoid the harsh mip texture transitions # 100903763 ba 01 27 00 00 MOV EDX,0x2701 # 1009037bd ba 01 27 00 00 MOV EDX,0x2701 # --- # BA 01 27 00 00 -> BA 03 27 00 00 sed -i '' $'s|\xBA\x01\x27|\xBA\x03\x27|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: SDL_GL_DEPTH_SIZE; Improve the depth buffer resolution/quality from 24 to 32 bits # BF 06 00 00 00 BE 18 00 00 00 -> BF 06 00 00 00 BE 20 00 00 00 # absolutely stupid sed workaround to avoid unsupported null bytes via capture group sed -i '' -E 's|'$'\xbf\x06''(...)'$'\xbe\x18''|'$'\xbf\x06''\1'$'\xbe\x20''|g' ./'Mount and Blade' # swy: Note: this old macOS sed adds a harmless carriage return byte (0A) at the end of the file; doesn't matter echo "\n\033[42mDone, hopefully.\033[0m" EOF
2. Close the Terminal window.

That's it. Open Steam like your normally do and use Warband's Configure utility to change the selected mod to «TLD». If you followed this guide properly then the game should launch and reach to the main menu.

Have fun in Middle-earth!

How to roll these changes back if your game breaks / Uninstalling the mod

If you have used previous versions of this guide (or something went wrong and your game no longer works correctly) you will need to verify the integrity of game files to get the original files back, as shown here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2037-QEUH-3335

Also, delete the Data folder we added under SteamApps > Common to fix the garbled fonts in other mods by pasting these lines in your Terminal:

rm "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Data" rm "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/workshop/Data"

Keep in mind that by using this newer macOS install method you should be able to keep TLD installed without replacing any game files, meaning that you should also be able to play Native and other mods. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Allowing custom fonts / Going back to the Native font

If you find the mod's font hard to read you can paste this into the Terminal window and press Enter, it will switch any installed versions of TLD to the basic font shader:

sh <<EOF && sh -c "# swy: zsh in catalina+ doesn't support inline comments: apple.stackexchange dot com/a/405317" modfolders=("\$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/MountBlade Warband/Modules/TLD/GLShadersOptimized" "\$HOME/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/workshop/content/48700/299974223/GLShadersOptimized") for curfolder in "\${modfolders[@]}"; do if [[ ! -d "\$curfolder" ]]; then continue; fi # swy: skip if that folder is missing cd "\$curfolder" && echo "{i} overwriting font shaders in \$curfolder" curl -LO raw.githubusercontent.c''om/tldmod/tldmod/no-custom-font/_wb/GLShaders/fs_font_outline.glsl curl -LO raw.githubusercontent.c''om/tldmod/tldmod/no-custom-font/_wb/GLShaders/fs_font_outline_mtarini.glsl done EOF

You can then delete or replace the mod's Data/font_data.xml and Textures/font.dds as with any other normal mod.