The beauty of game modification is that it can be as simple or as ambitious as a coder’s imagination and ability will allow, which allows for huge advanced versions of existing games or even completely new games to come out as a result.

This is what makes a Minecraft modding course so special; Minecraft is a game that is both exceptionally easy to mod but also has the scope to become even bigger than this, with some mod packs having hundreds of new features, items and blocks to use.

Here are three astonishingly ambitious mods that take the game they come from to new heights.

Dawn Of War: Unification

Warhammer 40,000 is a hugely popular tabletop game, but despite the dozens of games based on the famously grimdark universe, one of the most popular games based on the franchise is still Warhammer 40,000 Dawn Of War.

Its fast-paced real-time strategy gameplay still has fans to this day, even though the game is nearly 20 years old, and after two sequels that divided its player base due to very different gameplay, the community took charge and created a hugely ambitious mod called Unification.

It took the ten factions available in the original game and its three expansion packs, and added a further 18 factions, provided new units to the original factions, added professional voice acting for the new races, added new maps, campaign modes and scale to the original game.

Fallout: Tale Of Two Wastelands

Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are two games that have become beloved by players and modders alike, leading to hundreds of mods of different scales, sizes and ambitions.

One of the biggest and most successful of these, however, is Tale of Two Wastelands, a mod that combines Fallout 3 and New Vegas together, allowing for a seamless play-through of the two individual games.

XCOM: The Long War

Available for both XCOM and its sequel, The Long War added a lot of features to create a longer, expanded campaign that took advantage of the dynamic AI and procedural gameplay systems of the original games, which emphasised much larger recruiting pools and large scale planetary defence.

It was so broad in scope and so popular that Firaxis Games, the creator of the original game, actually commissioned the developers to create a version for XCOM 2 as well.