Halo 3 Mods: A Tutorial on Halo 3 Modding for Beginners

How to Mod Halo 3 Forge variants tutorial shows you how to create, modify, and resign a Halo 3 Forge variant. This is intended for beginners who would like an introduction into Halo 3 modding of usermaps.


How to Mod Halo 3 Forge Variants
Written by Lewie

Overview
What you will learn in this tutorial:
How to get a usermap off of your Xbox 360 HDD using Xplorer360 or XPort 360.
How to extract and inject a usermap into a CON file.
How to properly rehash and resign a usermap file.

Requirements
XSATA or XPort
Get XSATA here:
USA: XB360 XSATA - Codejunkies US
UK: XB360 XSATA - Codejunkies UK
Get XPort here:
USA: XB360 Xport - Codejunkies US
UK: XB360 Xport - Codejunkies UK
CON Resigner - Concept
XPort360 - XPort360
Xplorer360 - Xplorer360
Sandbox - Sandbox.zip
Container Edits (CE) – Container_Edits.rar
In this tutorial, I will be using derived’s CON resigner and Shade45's CON Hasher.

Please download all of the above software, as each program will be needed throughout the tutorial.


The Tutorial:

First you should create a map on your Xbox 360 by placing a few frag grenades (or whatever you want.)

Next we save the map. If you save the map once it is normally 116kb, if you save more than once, it becomes 176kb, because Halo 3 creates a backup of your map.

After saving, transfer the maps to your computer using XPort or XSATA and using the XPort 360 software to manage them. You can extract the files by dragging them out of XPort 360 and into your folder.



Now, open the CE tool and open your usermap.

Hit the “Extract sandbox from Container” and get ready to use Sandbox.




Before we go on, make sure you have all of the maps from Halo 3 or the .map file of the usermap you are modifying. You can edit the settings of Sandbox to specify your .map folder.
Open Sandbox and open the extracted map file: _____.map
With Sandbox, many opportunities are opened up that were hard to do with hex editing. You can edit the location all of the editable objects on the map, switch out objects for another and multiply them as you wish. Sandbox’s layout is made to be simple and very useful, so utilize it for great things.




After you are done editing the map, save the edits and close Sandbox. Open the CE tool and open your original CON file. Hit the “inject Sandbox into container” button and select the .map file you edited in Sandbox.






On to rehashing and resigning
Open up Shade’s rehasher and click the button in the middle and select your usermap file. It will now be rehashed.



Open derived’s resigner. Click the load button and select your usermap. After verifying it is the correct file, click the sign button. It will ask for a KV.bin file. Select the one you have and the usermap will now be resigned.



The final step is to Transfer the map back to your Xbox 360 HDD/MU.
If all goes well when you load it in H3 just fine.

Here is an example:


Remember this is only one way to do it. I do it a different way but this is the easy way.