Half-Life: Alyx Steam Workshop opens mod support & offers tools like level editor

Half-Life: Alyx may be a VR game, but that doesn’t mean it has any less of a community desiring to create user-end content for it with any tools available. We’ve already seen a few attempts at projects without Valve support, but Valve has come through to lend a hand to the effort themselves. Steam Workshop support is available for Half-Life: Alyx and an official batch of modding tools have been launched alongside the opening of the game’s Workshop.

Valve announced Steam Workshop support for Half-Life: Alyx in an update on the game’s Steam news hub on May 15, 2020. According to Steam, not only will Steam Workshop support now be able, allowing players to seamlessly upload and integrate mods into Half-Life: Alyx via their Steam client, but a set of tools have been launched in beta format to aid with the creation of new mods. We’ve seen mods created in the past already for Half-Life: Alyx, including an early attempt at making the game playable without VR, as well as a horde monster wave game mode. That said, the new tools directly from Valve should lend a hand in creating new projects.

With the ability to edit levels, textures, animations, and more, mods are already popping up the Half-Life: Alyx Steam Workshop.

The list of tools released by Valve for the Steam Workshop support of Half-Life: Alyx can be seen below.

Hammer: the latest version of the Source 2 level editor.
Material Editor: the tool for creating and tuning materials in Source 2.
ModelDoc: a tool for viewing, editing, and compiling models with animation, collision, and other gameplay attributes.
AnimGraph: our animation tool used to create complicated animation setups with blends and transitions.
Particle Editor: for making new particle effects.
Subrect Editor: for creating smart texture sheets known as "hotspots."
Source Filmmaker: the Source 2 cinematic renderer and animation tool.

With these tools available to all modders, it will be interesting to see what kind of assets, levels, and larger-scale collections and projects the community assembles for Half-Life: Alyx. Stay tuned as we watch for interesting mods on the Half-Life: Alyx Steam Workshop, or check out our Shacknews review to see what we thought of the base game.