Below is a list of things I've found helpful to get load times down. Experiment!

1. use https://github.com/levinium/D2RExtractor to extract game files from casc storage (do not use Ladik's anymore, it's broken as of the latest patch). Run with additional commands -direct -txt once, which generates .bin files. After that, just using -direct is faster, because the game loads the .bin files directly, and doesn't need to recreate them from all the game .txt files before running the .bin files.

2. Set in-game graphics to the lowest possible. No vsync, game running on 50% scaling, 0 fps cap, 300 fps target, no anti-aliasing, no sharpening, enable dynamic resolution scaling. After doing this, go to C:/users/.../Saved_Games/D2R/settings and you can turn down settings here even lower than is possible in-game. Just experiment with changing numbers to 0.

3. Regularly purge C:/ProgramData. It's a hidden folder so you need to enable viewing hidden folders in the file explorer.

4. Use winhance to get rid of bloatware.

5. Disable overlays from nvidia, discord, steam, web browsers, etc.

6. Disable hardware acceleration in microsoft edge, google chrome, discord, etc, as well as in system settings if possible.

7. If you can live without sound, use -ns additional command line for (marginally) faster speeds in D2R.

Past this, you need to go the modding route. You can disable or reduce a lot of the presets, which my mod does (see profile). Just disabling presets will not alter graphics, it just changes when things are loaded. Normally, when you enter act 5, the game automatically loads Colossal Madawc's attack animations and spell particles/textures. In reality, you just don't need to load that until you pop the colossal altar. There's a lot of this going on behind the scenes.

Going a step further, you must make trade-offs in visuals, as you can see in the video showcasing my mod on the first page. There's just no way to reduce the load times further unless you force the game to not load hd content. When running the game normally, every time the game loads something, it looks to the compressed game data in D2R/Data/data and transcribes that into game assets that you can see and interact with in-game. Using -direct mode, you can give the game the files to work with directly so it doesn't need to translate the compressed data storage. When using -mod ..., the game loads anything there directly (just like -direct) and anything that's missing from there is translated from the compressed game storage (same with -direct). The way that HD-blocking mods work is they mimic the structure of the extracted game files from casc, but a lot of the HD content is zeroed out. This is not the same as deleting files. Deleting the file within the mod would just cause the game to instead load that from the compressed game storage and not save you time. Zeroing out files means keeping the structure but rewriting them to be 0 kb files. As an example, you can use powershell to instantly zero out all the environmental texture files with

This change alone will have the greatest impact on your load times, but it comes at a visual price that must be paid. If you zero out too much, then the game breaks. Some files need to be carefully ammended to reduce some content without breaking stuff. It's a tightrope walk. Some files can be reduced in size like texture and particle files, and that will ease system load and increase speeds. You can mess with reference files like data/hd/missiles/missiles.json to change all the assassin martial arts skills to produce throwing knives rather than the crazy chain lightning stuff. That'll increase fps for mosaic sins. Gonna require tons of testing, learning about modding resources from Bonesy'd discord and youtube vids, learning about other mods and truly inspecting their structure (feel free to work with mine); others to look at would be TinyMod by Gimli, mininexus, and korean mods on their forums.

This post was edited by celloboy126 on Apr 4 2026 12:05pm

send me this

done :-D