Getting Started With Raccoon Games Projects
Raccoon Games is a Polish indie studio based in Warsaw. They make games like Dredge, Small Radiotelepathic Black Suns, and The Moonglow Block. If you're looking to get into modding their games or working with their tools, there isn't an official SDK to speak of. What exists is community-driven, which means you'll spend a lot of time figuring things out by yourself. Most people come to Raccoon Games after playing Dredge and wanting to modify it or create their own content. The good news is that Dredge has a decent modding scene. The bad news is that the documentation is scattered across GitHub gists and Discord channels from 2023. I spent about two weeks last winter trying to get a custom fish model to appear in-game without breaking the save file. Here's what I learned.
Raccoon Games Modding Realities
Dredge uses Unity, which immediately tells you that the asset files are bundled into .assetbundle files inside the game directory. You can find these under the Data folder. Extracting them requires something like Universal Unreal Extractor or a Unity Asset Bundle browser tool. I used uabextract and had it running within thirty minutes. The mod itself is just a modified bundle you drop into the right folder and reference from a config file. The actual mod structure for Dredge looks like this: you create a folder in your Documents/Raccoon Games/Dredge/Mods directory, put your .assetbundle files inside, and then create a mod.json file that tells the game what to load. The schema is straightforward. Here's a basic version: { "name": "My Mod", "version": "1.0", "dependencies": [], "files": ["assets/my_fish.bundle"] }
The trick isn't the JSON though. It's making sure your bundle references are correct. When I exported my custom fish mesh, the material paths broke because the original shader references pointed to internal Unity paths that don't exist in the mod context. The workaround was to bake the materials into the mesh itself using Blender and export as GLB, then convert to an asset bundle using Unity's own BuildPipeline with a minimal script. I wrote a five-line Unity editor script that did this automatically. Without it, every texture lookup would fail at runtime and your model would just appear as a pink wireframe. That pink wireframe thing is the universal sign of a broken material reference in Unity. If you see it, your shader paths are wrong. Small Radiotelepathic Black Suns is a different story entirely. It doesn't have the same modding infrastructure that Dredge accumulated over time. The game runs on a modified version of the Unity engine and the save format is proprietary. There are tools emerging on GitHub but nothing stable enough to recommend for serious work yet. If you're trying to mod that one, expect to write a lot of Python scripts to reverse-engineer the save structure first.
Get the Full Details
One thing beginners consistently get wrong is assuming that replacing a texture file directly in the game directory will work. It won't. Unity packages everything into those bundles and the game reads from the bundled versions, not loose files. You have to go through the bundle extraction and repackaging pipeline every single time. I've seen people spend three hours wondering why their edit didn't apply when the fix was literally one command: unpack the bundle, swap the file, repack it.
Where to Find the Games
Dredge is available on Steam, itch.io, and GOG. The Moonglow Block shipped on Steam and Xbox. Small Radiotelepathic Black Suns is on Steam. All of them support community mods to varying degrees. Dredge is by far the most mod-friendly at this point. If you want the download links, they're straightforward. Steam is the primary distribution channel. Raccoon Games doesn't offer direct downloads from their website. You can find community tools and documentation on the official Dredge subreddit and the Raccoon Games Discord server, though the Discord archives from early 2023 are where most of the technical gold lives now.
Common Pitfalls
The biggest issue people run into is version mismatch. Dredge has had multiple patches since launch and the mod format shifted slightly between versions 1.0 and 1.2. If you pull a mod tool from GitHub without checking the commit date, it might not work with your game version. Always verify your game build number against whatever tool you're using. I learned this the hard way when a perfectly valid mod simply didn't load and I spent four hours debugging before realizing the tool was built against an older assembly. Another problem is that some Raccoon Games titles use custom serialization for their save data. Dredge's save format is relatively transparent since it's JSON-based. The Moonglow Block uses a more opaque binary format. If you're planning to write a save editor or a mod that interacts with saves, start with Dredge. The others will require significantly more reverse engineering effort. Performance-wise, poorly packaged asset bundles can cause loading stutters. Unity's bundling process isn't perfect and if you include uncompressed textures or redundant assets in your bundle, the game will choke on it during transitions. Keep your bundles lean. Compress your textures. Remove any debug meshes or unused materials before building. I cut my average bundle size from 40 megabytes down to under 8 by auditing what I was actually shipping.
There's also the matter of anti-cheat. Dredge doesn't use any anti-cheat system so modding is completely safe from a ban perspective. Other Raccoon Games titles may be on platforms where modification could trigger flags. Check the platform terms before you dig into the files. It's not something I worry about with Dredge on PC but it matters if you're modding the console versions or any multiplayer-enabled titles they might release. That's the state of things right now. The modding tools improve with each update and the community keeps documenting what works. If you're patient and don't mind reading through old Discord messages and GitHub issues, you can do a lot with Raccoon Games titles. If you want everything to be plug-and-play, you're going to be disappointed for a while longer.
