Mods

Introduction

Mods covers the creative side of Scam With Your Friends, which is a bigger part of the game than the store page makes obvious. Steam Workshop support is built in, custom callers are defined through JSON personality files, and voice cloning uses WAV files, which together mean the community can author the people you end up talking to. For a game whose callers are generated live, that is an unusually powerful position: the shape of a session is partly decided by whoever is publishing content. This section explains how each layer works in practice, which parts are official and supported, and where the process still breaks. The failures are worth knowing because they are almost all process problems rather than content problems, and most of them are avoidable with a little patience.

Workshop Health Check

Modding Layers

Core Mechanics

Modding in Scam With Your Friends works on two levels that are easy to confuse. The first is content: a caller is defined by a JSON personality file that describes how they behave, and a voice is supplied as a WAV file used for voice cloning. Both formats are plain files rather than proprietary packages, which is why the community has been able to author callers without waiting for official tools. The second level is distribution. Steam Workshop support is built into the game, so publishing and installing a caller does not require anything external; the game talks to the Workshop directly. The two levels meet in the caller pool, which is what actually determines whether your custom caller appears during a shift. That means a mod that looks finished can still be invisible in play if the pool has not picked it up, and it means troubleshooting should always start by asking whether the game knows the caller exists.

Advantages

The strongest argument for learning the modding layer is that it extends the game's variability, which is the feature the entire design rests on. Because callers are generated live and the pool can be widened with community content, a crew can deliberately shape the kind of sessions they want, from purely comedic callers to deliberately hostile ones. The file formats keep the barrier low: JSON personalities are editable in a text editor and WAV files are a standard audio format, so no specialist tooling stands between an idea and a working caller. Distribution is just as frictionless thanks to built-in Workshop support, which lets a creator publish and a player install without leaving the game. Hotfix 2 also improved the loading cost of custom caller voices, which removed one of the practical reasons players previously avoided larger collections.

Challenges

The modding pipeline is functional but not polished, and the sharpest edge is the Workshop upload. Uploads have been observed to stall in a way that blocks later uploads from the same session, which turns a straightforward publishing task into a patient, one-at-a-time ritual. Voice work has its own trap: custom voices depend on the Qwen3 package, so a mod that sounds broken may simply be running ahead of an unfinished download. There is also a moving target problem. Localize Voice buttons were removed as languages moved to the voice download, so older community instructions no longer match the interface, and creators following a guide written before that change will look for a control that no longer exists. Combined with the fact that a mod can be technically correct and still fail to appear in the pool, patience matters more than skill here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick Tips