On 10 January 2025, Marvel Rivals players awoke to find that, overnight, the unthinkable had happened.

NetEase had finally come for their beloved mods, erasing any and all custom skins from the game – forever.

No more Pochita Jeff. No more Vegeta as Iron Man. No more Goth Mommy Mantis. Never forget what they took from us.

Of course, the modding community is nothing if not tenacious. A little asset hash check isn’t going to get in the way of the incorrigible One Piece community, especially when they just introduced Mister Fantastic into the game.

That’s right folks, mods are still alive and kicking – they just need “extra steps to pull off” now, according to the @RivalsLeaks Twitter account.

What do “extra steps” entail? Well, the steps required to actually install something definitely look longer now for sure.

The Luffy skin featured in the above Twitter post also mentions the Unreal Engine tool FModel is now required to install skins, something I’m pretty sure wasn’t a prerequisite before the new patch.

As spotted by GamesRadar’s Anna Koselke, it seems said extra steps haven’t slowed the Marvel Rivals community down either – with almost 200 unique mods dropping over on Nexus over the past week.

Around 15 of those landed within the last 24 hours too, so the countermeasure that NetEase implemented a few days ago clearly wasn’t as airtight as they might have hoped.

Oh, actually, I take that back – it’s actually 17 new mods if you turn off the NSFW filter. In fact, most of the NSFW mods for Marvel Rivals aren’t actually on Nexus. You’ll have to go to some sketchier corners of the internet to find those, corners I am not going to link you to.

Good effort, NetEase, but you guys knew what you were doing when you made Sue Storm.