I’m more excited about Single-Player Tarkov mod’s player-made content that the official updates

Escape From Tarkov has, by most measures, managed to stabilize its community and meta since the last time I talked about it. The big tripwire update is neat, too, but I just can’t bring myself to play it anymore. Instead, I spend my time in SPT, and it’s a hoot.

Now, obviously, I’m a bit weird when it comes to my gaming preferences. I actively play Helldivers 2 on my own, deliberately. And, really, I’ve never been shy about the fact that I adore what the SPT team has done with Escape From Tarkov. By now, though, I’m absolutely all-in on Single-Player Tarkov with virtually no interest in actually getting my PMC eviscerated by a cheater on the official servers. Some are probably going to wonder why on Earth wouldn’t I just jump into Escape From Tarkov‘s official PvE mode, and the answer is actually very simple: mods.

The fact that SPT (now simplified from the mod’s previous SPT-AKI moniker) is a fair few build and content updates behind official has stopped worrying me. The FOMO of using the aforementioned tripwires, bipods, and the revered Desert Eagle gets pretty inconsequential when you have access to SPT’s ridiculously varied glut of player-made content, you see.

To be fair, SPT has always had mods. A community has been brewing in the 𝓰background of this project for a very long🏅 time now, and some modders are still simply updating their years-old custom content to keep it relevant in 2024 and beyond.

From my personal experience, however, it wasn’t until SPT’s 3.8 build (one before the current 3.9ish) that SPT’s modding scene really took off. We now have significant near-weekly community content drops from some creator groups. Usually, they include entirely new guns, such as , which I don’t believe I’ve seen in any other media just yet.

For the nostalgia hounds, however, I’d recommend both variants of the , as they allow you to set up custom builds with . For those who want to modernize their ACR kit, the has also been developed for SPT. Yes, those are three different versions of the same weapon, more or less, except each is slightly different in some meaningful ways. Perfect for a gun nerd.

New guns are just the tip of the iceberg for SPT, naturally. I’ve previously discussed the addition of Pokemon cards to the game as an opt🍌ional high-value collectible. Well, now there are , too. If you want to add even more zesty variety to your SPT experience, you could install the and mods as well, each adding a kind of ridiculous number of real-world food ‘n’ stuff. I’ve installed an incredible number of mods to my build of SPT by now, and there have been no problems with crashing or anything like that. The initial loading, granted, is a bit longer, but I can live with it.

Just to circle back to SPT being a few content updates behind Escape From Tarkov live, a dedicated modder has . Kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?

The sheer breadth and variety of community-made mods for SPT are astonishing. Escape From Tarkov is the much-needed baseline for SPT, and BSG’s work is hugely valued. The thing is that I just cannot see myself returning to the stock Tarkov experience, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

This is where it gets interesting, sort of. Battlestate Games has, as of very recently, that “[they] will add MOD support for PvE mode after release of the game.” I’ve got absolutely no idea how that might work, but I expect this will be a hugely neutered feature that won’t be able to compare to the stuff that SPT modders have been putting out.

It’s still good news, of course, and a potential sign that BSG might properly upgrade the official PvE game mode down the line.

As it currently stands, though? SPT has far superior AI, a greater variety of content, and essentially weekly content drops that you can but don’t have to interact with. All of it is driven by the community, all thanks to mods. I just don’t see the official PvE mode being open enough to meaningfully integrate all of these upgrades.

And so I’m more than happy to stick a few builds behind Tarkov proper just to be able to access the SPT community’s content goodness. In fact, I’m way more excited about new mod drops nowadays than I am about Escape From Tarkov‘s major content updates. It’s not something I expected to happen just a few years back, but here we are.