Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition Randomizer (LE2R) at Mass Effect Legendary Edition Nexus

Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition Randomizer (LE2R) allows you to randomize many different parts of the game – from strange, quirky things such as eyes and FaceFX, to gameplay such as powers and weapons.

The standout feature for this randomizer is the Suicide Mission randomizer! It turns the final mission into an actual suicide mission, with much higher difficulty that is not done by making all enemies bullet sponges.

Recommended additional mods
The following mods were used during development and will enhance your randomizer experience:

How do I use the randomizer?
MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THESE STEPS – INSTALLING MODS AFTER RANDOMIZER WILL CAUSE THEM TO LIKELY NOT WORK AND YOU’LL HAVE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN.

1. If you have not made a backup, make one first.
2. Install any other mods you want to use. See above for recommended additional mods. Texture mods can be used, but are not recommended for use with Randomizer due to the extra complexity of 3 different tools.
3. Select options you wish to install, or use a preset. You can turn on labels in the bottom left, which gives more information about what can and cannot be turned on or off after install. These options will be labeled ‘Runtime’.
4. Press ‘Run Randomizer’ and let it cook for a while.
5. When randomization completes, if you’ve used ME3Tweaks Mod Manager, it will boot and automatically perform a merge DLC to help ensure your mods stay in sync with the new randomization. If you’ve never used it before, it won’t boot, and you can ignore. A future update will remove this step, but it will take time to get there.
6. Once installed, play the game normally. You can return to LE2R and choose ‘Option toggler’ to turn runtime options on or off without reinstalling anything. Note that not all options support this feature.

Removing a randomization
Randomizer has two ways to restore:

1. Full restore will make your game mirror your backup state, fully deleting and resetting everything. This is the recommended way to fully reset the game.
2. A quick restore will remove the DLC component and basegame changes. However, if you use other mods, they may depend on basegame changes, and this option may break them. You may need to have Mod Manager perform a DLC merge; this will be automated in the future. You can trigger one by toggling a DLC on and off in the ‘Manage Target’ window of Mod Manager.

To manually restore the game, delete the DLC_MOD_LE2Randomizer folder and repair the game. If you don’t remove the DLC folder and just do a repair, your game WILL crash, guaranteed.Do I need a backup?
Technically no – but you’re going to spend a lot of time verifying and re-downloading the entirety of Mass Effect Legendary Edition if you don’t. ME3Tweaks-based tools all can leverage the same backup.

RESTORING SFXGAME.PCC OR ENGINE.PCC WITHOUT REMOVING THE RANDOMIZATION DLC WILL NEARLY ALWAYS LEAD TO GUARANTEED CRASHES.

How stable is the randomizer?
Tested with a few basic mods (outfits, Unofficial LE2 Patch, Modern Weapon Pack), stability is for the most part good. There is a consistent, but extremely difficult to reproduce, crash that seems to occur after transitioning areas. I’d say it happens perhaps once every few hours. Typically a restart will fix it. The worst case of this I’ve seen is it requiring two restarts over dozens of hours of testing.

This randomizer is not tested against a lot of mods – supporting all of them would be nearly impossible.

System requirements
Memory
LE2R loads a bunch of extra things in. The game seems to average about 700MB more than usual (so plan for about 6GB usage, where vanilla is around 5). Randomization typically uses between 2 and 6GB of memory, depending on what is being done at the time.

Disk
LE2R requires several gigabytes of disk space, as it will patch game files and move them into its own DLC folder, which will then override other mods. This allows for quick and easy re-randomization. You will also want to have a ME3Tweaks-based backup.

In total, if you are coming from a completely vanilla install (never modded before, no backups), you will likely need about 40GB of disk space. Yes, that’s a lot of disk space, but that’s unfortunately how the game engine works – tons of files have to be edited.

It is recommended to your game on an SSD as pawns loading in will read extra files off disk. Certain options (such as Give powers to all enemies) will force more disk loading, which may result in more game stutter. Enemy power and weapon randomizer option Randomize once per loadout can improve performance by only randomizing a group of enemies instead of individual enemies.

Can I make my own mod based off a randomizer result and release it?
No. There are a lot of things in this randomizer that depend on randomizer features that took many weeks to develop. There’s also a lot of changes to avoid softlocks, even for things that seem simple, such as changing squadmate powers. You’re free to do whatever you want with a result for personal use.

Isn’t this just ME2R that you released two years ago?
Technically yes, but not really. Many randomizers were rewritten to work at runtime, which means they change every time the game boots, an enemy loads, etc. ME2R only did fixed randomization at install time.

What about LE1R and LE3R?
These randomizers are in development, but will take significantly more time to release. A lot of scaffolding work for LE2R will be used in LE1R and LE3R.

Known Bugs

• When using ‘Squadmate Heads’, Thane’s loyalty outfit will change to be the same as his vanilla version.
• A softlock was reported for the Praetorian on the Collector Ship. However, it was unable to be reproduced. This is likely due to Enemy Power Randomizer. A reload will fix the problem.