Custom Assets

Custom assets are 3D models and textures added to Amnesia which usually make mods look like shit. Almost never made by the people who use them. Some common sources for them are free models and textures from the Internet, Penumbra assets and assets ripped from other games.

Most modders don’t have the brains to notice that their custom assets are eyesores which don’t fit Amnesia’s artstyle. As a result, when custom assets are used they often make the mods even worse than they already are.

While technically Machine For Pigs assets are custom, they are commonly not considered to be, because they were made to fit The Dark Descent’s assets.

Most cases of custom asset usage are randomly dropping a poorly textured object with shitty collision into an otherwise normal Amnesia map.

Asset refuck

An asset refuck is a mod which chooses to predominantly use custom assets and ends up looking like shit.

MFP-based mods could be considered asset refucks, but they usually look fairly decent and are quite rare. Most often though asset refucks will attempt a modern setting and use assets ported from Penumbra. This almost always results in a disaster, because:

• The creator will still use Amnesia assets made for an 18th century setting
• They will predominantly use pure white light, which is a devil sin in level design
• They will often use very bright lights, and Amnesia’s lighting engine looks dogshit when that’s done

The most popular asset refuck of all time is White Night. While it rips off enough things¹ to not be complete crap, White Night in places looks absolutely awful due to the aforementioned reasons.

I mean, look at this. We didn’t even cherry pick a side area of the mod, it was proudly posted on the mod page.

Pirated music

Some modders think it’s a brilliant idea to add music from other games or even movies to their mod. It usually feels very cringey and sabotages any mood-building done in the mod. Many people will be taken out of the experience because of the dissonance between hearing a song from their favorite game and playing some crappy escape mansin mod.

Custom monsters

Custom monsters are famously hard to create, because they require skills such as:

• General 3D modeling
• Character modeling (anatomy, sculpture)
• Texture creation
• Sound design
• Character design
• Animation

Additionally, for animated models to work properly in Amnesia, they have to be exported from an antique version of Maya which can only be pirated and is really hard to find.

As such, whenever someone advertises having custom monsters, they are some of the same 5-10 monsters made by the community for public use. Wouldn’t be an issue if most of them didn’t look really amateurish and often lacked original sound design. The rest are often really silly – for example there is a custom monster which is just the butt-naked Alexander ghost with new animations.

While these monsters can be made scary, it is even harder than when using the original ones. Very few mods ever pulled it off.

Footnotes