Fan Works / Hearts of Iron

The Hearts Of Iron franchise has always had some good mods, but Hearts Of Iron 4 in particular has a very creative and flourishing modding community.

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Mods with their own pages

• Another Freedom New Iron Curtain, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod in which the Soviet Union collapsed following the death of Joseph Stalin.
• Beyond Earth: A mod based on the setting of Civilization: Beyond Earth, with a few cues taken from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It features a futuristic setting following the catastrophic Great Mistake and its subsequent Dark Age, with the future of humanity - and whether it can or should remain on Earth - remaining uncertain.
• Bring the War Home, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod set in an alternate United States where, following massive civil strife and an expanded Vietnam War, the US descends into civil war.
• Eternal Golden Dawn is a Hearts of Iron 4 mod set in an alternate history where technological advance became much more rapid. As a result, by 1980, the world is more dependent on computers and robots, leading to a Cyberpunk-styled world.
• Equestria at War, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod set in an expanded, Darker and Edgier version of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic setting that blends WW2 tech with Magitek and fantasy races.
  • Balefire Blues, a submod for Equestria at War and Old World Blues, set in the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout: Equestria.
• Extremis Ultimis, a mod set in an alternate 2023 where new radical ideologies are threatening to topple weak democracies across the Western world.
• The Fire Rises (Mod), set in an alternate 2020 where the COVID-19 Pandemic is much stronger. This results in economies crashing, increased political unrest, the deaths of some prominent political figures (King Salman and Vladimir Putin being among them), and the radicalization of various political groups. One thing leads to another, and the United States of America soon collapses into a Second American Civil War that shakes the status quo of the world.
• The Gates of Versailles, an alt-history mod exploring a world where the Napoleonic Wars ended in a stalemate and France remained an empire and the Jacobin ideology supplanted communism as the predominant far-left ideology.
• Hearts of Minecraft, a Hoi4 mod based on... you guessed it. Minecraft. Set in a completely original world map split among 3 continents, it takes the setting of Minecraft and turns it into gritty strategy game with fantastical elements. It even uses Minecraft sound effects for the UI!
• Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, set in an alternate history where the Central Powers won WWI. Active since Hearts of Iron 2 and one of the largest mods of the community.
  • Edelweiss, a Dating Sim that allows you, the player, to choose which idealogue you'd like to romance. No seriously.
  • Kaiserredux, a fork (formerly submod) and expansion of Kaiserreich that focuses on interesting scenarios over realism, without changing the scenario too dramatically.
  • Two non-official sequels of Kaiserreich imagining an alternate Cold War between the victors of the alternate WW2:
    • Kalterkrieg: Shadow of the Weltkrieg: The Cold War is between the Entente and the Reichpakt.
    • Krasnacht: Twilight of the Gods: The Cold War is between the International Workers’ Armed Forces (formely, the International) and the Saratov Pact (an alliance of European far-right countries led by Russia).
  • Führerreich: Legacy of the Great War, a Spinoff of Kaiserreich based on a fictional alternate history book inside the Kaiserreich world where Germany lost WW1 but had a radically different result than our timeline.
• Love Thy Neighbour Mod, a mod set in an alternate 1982 where new religious cults, greedy cabals, and ideological revolutionaries are fighting over the last pieces left of the world, following a global pandemic in the 1950s.
• The New Order: Last Days of Europe, an alt-history mod for Hearts of Iron 4 set in a world where the Axis achieves a total victory in the Second World War, and then everything goes From Bad to Worse. TNO is a narrative driven and incredibly ambitious Doorstopper featuring large amounts of unique events and scenarios. Cold Southern Springs is a former submod of The New Order focusing on the Latin American countries that has since been incorporated into the mod proper.
  • The New Order: A New Millennium, an upcoming sequel set in 2000.
  • The New Order: The Second West Russian War, which adds mechanics and content for the Second West Russian War, the final conflict between the Third Reich and the various Russian warlords, as well as skeleton content for the major powers.
  • The New Order The Light Of Eos, which is also set in 2000, with the Third Reich, U.S., Japan, Tsarist Russia, and Italy all fighting for control of the world.
  • The New Order: Roter Morgen, which adds a new path to Speer's Germany that turns the Nazi superpower into an emerging communist power, drastically changing the dynamics of the Cold War.
  • The Fading Order Winds Of Change, a continuation of the original TNO story that takes place in The '80s.
  • The Red Order: First Days of Eurasia is a spinoff of The New Order, where the Axis lost World War II; it features a three-way cold war between the United States, Nikolai Bukharin's Soviet Union, and the French and British Empires.
• Old World Blues, a mod set in (and allowing the player to determine the outcome of) the events of Fallout: New Vegas. Since has been expanded to include the entire West Coast, including all of Mexico and parts of Canada, as well as expanding eastward into the Great Plains and Texas.
  • Enclave Reborn: A popular submod adding in the remnants of the Navarro Enclave, licking their wounds following the Enclave's defeat in Fallout 2, as a playable faction.
• Pax Britannica, set in a dystopian Diesel Punk timeline where The American Revolution failed, allowing The British Empire to hold on more into the colonies. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison inventions has succeeded, resulting in a technological boom.
• Pride And Fall: A mod set in an alternate history where Poland is fractured into many smaller states.
• Red Flood: formerly a spinoff of Kaiserreich, it has since grown into an independent mod set in a world in which nobody has truly won WW1. Starting on a Russian victory against the Japanese, France losing against Germany then Germany losing against Russia, resulting in another different world, where the major powers include a weakened Commonwealth, a communist Germany, a nationalist and divided Russian Empire, and an Avant-Garde France ruled by a faction of artists.
  • Judgement Day: Aftermath of the Red Flood: An unofficial sequel set in a Cold War between Accelerationist France, Scythist Russia and socialist Japan.
• Red World: A modern-day alternate history mod where the Soviet Union "wins" the Cold War but fails to create a new world order and has to dispute the control of the world with fellow socialists and communists.
• Spartakus: World in Revolution, an alternate history total conversion mod for Hearts of Iron IV that explores a timeline where a more successful Spartacist uprising known as the May Revolution overthrew the Weimar government and resulted in Germany becoming a communist state, incidentally resulting in the Revolutions of 1917-23 being far more successful with several other communist nations established.
• Thousand-Week Reich, another alt-history mod for Hearts of Iron 4 set in a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War. While similar to The New Order conceptually, Thousand-Week Reich strives for a more realistic scenario, and plays very differently.
• Twilight of the Anthropocene, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod set in a chaotic alternate universe where technology is 20 years ahead of OTL.
• Von Der Asche, a loose adaptation of Robert Harris' novel Fatherland.

Other mods of interest

• Hearts of Iron: 1984, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod set in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, making each of the three Space Filling Empires playable; the disputed areas are themselves split into five playable countries (Free Africa, Free Arabia, Free India, Free Indochina, and Free Indonesia). The starting date is 1980 and a world war erupts in 1984 thanks to a scripted event. Due to the limited scope of the source (the novel being told from the perspective of an average citizen living in a specific part of Oceania), the modder had to use their imagination to fill the blanks, starting with the leaders of the other nations; Eurasia's leader is named "Mother Russia" and represented by a portrait of Valentina Tereshkova (of all people), while Eastasia's leader is named "Immortal Father" and is represented by a portrait of Mao Zedong. Due to its limited number of nations (and the fact AI is bad at managing empires so huge), this mod is actually intended for multiplayer games (though an alternate scenario is included, which splits the three superstates into five independent allied nations, more manageable by the AI).
• Bismarckreich set in 1935 this mod takes place in a world where due to Otto von Bismarck being assassinated on a diplomatic visit to England Germany remains divided.
• BlackICE, a "historical immersion mod". Unlike countless other mods from this lists, its main selling point is trying to recreate as much of history and historical background as only possible, while throwing it into mix of already expanded gameplay rules and unit and technology rework. Oh, and being developed for HoI3, utilising fully its infamously layered gameplay mechanics to the fullest, so combined arms, proper division structure, logistics, production efficiency, weather, air coverage and radio range are going to haunt you if you don't take them all seriously enough. A HoI4 version exists, but it's nowhere near as polished as the one for 3, especially considering how the base game is still in active development, while 3's wrapped years ago.
• The Crossover World Mod, a Hearts of Iron 4 mod which combines over 25 various universes^ExamplesSofia the First, Squirrel and Hedgehog, Ace Attorney, Tabaluga, Shrek and Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda on custom map. While it may look weird at first, the timeline and available choices are designed as much as possible to make sense, at the same time making things Darker and Edgier.
• Cold War Iron Curtain: A World Divided, a mod for Hearts of Iron 4 that, starting in 1949, not only seeks to cover the entirety of the postwar era, but also offers various new features and a much-expanded tech-tree. The mod also notably features super events and varied paths for the major powers to follow, potentially resulting in myriad alternate history takes on the Cold War.
• Darkest Hour started as a historical mod for HoI2, eventually released as a game on its own when Paradox started licensing its Europa engine.
• FODD or FallOut DoomsDay mod is at this point an ancient mod for HoI2 (as the name implies, works begun around the time Doomsday expansion for HoI2 was released), eventually migrating to Darkest Hour and is still in development, with semi-regular updates. Unlike most Fallout mods, this one does its darnest to provide content for all of North America, rather than focusing on NCR or New Vegas content. Unlike most Fallout mods, it ignores entirely Fallout 3 and 4 (sans The Pitt DLC), while fully embracing Fallout Tactics, so YMMV.
• Hearts of Iron IV: The Great War, an overhaul based on the Great War-era. The game has three starting dates, set in 1910, 1914, and 1919. To more accurately reflect World War One-warfare, the tech tree and units efficiency have been revised, as infantry and artillery are the main tools while rudimentary planes are high-tech, and defensive buildings are much important than in Vanilla (and the war is much more of a slow war of attrition than in Vanilla. While the Great War is the main focus of the mod, it also features The Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution.
• Several popular and related modern day 21st century mods, including Modern Day Scenario II for Hearts of Iron 2, most notably Millennium Dawn: Modern Day^note Merged in 2019 from Millennium Dawn Classic, Modern Day 4, Yet Another Modern Day Mod 2 and Modern Warfare Mod.
  • Millennium Dawn deserves special mention for how extensively it manages to convert the World War II formula of the regular game into a modern conflict. Not only does it model modern religions, ideologies, and internal factions, but the player has to deal with economy and debt, nations can influence and manipulate each other through poitics and trade, and it features an entirely new system for various types of missiles, ranging from air defense and cruise missiles to an entire space program where players can build and launch satellites into orbit to get an edge over their rivals.
• New Ways, a mod of Hearts of Iron 4 starting in 1936, which adds new alternate history paths to Vanilla majors, new content to many minor countries, an overhaul of the focus tree for generic countries, new ideologies (anarchism, technocracy, monarchism...), a building slots' cap raised to 36 buildings per province, an overhauled geographic division, a feature scaling the number of spy slots to the country's industrial capacity, and a lot of new playable countries. Several of those countries are historical colonies split from their controller and converted into puppets (French Indochina, Belgian Congo, British Palestine, Newfoundland, Ceylon...), but a few are independent (Liechtenstein, Monaco, Vatican...); it also adds many new Chinese warlords. It also adds a "5 December 1941" start scenario, which actually is an alternate history setting with heavily-balkanized countries, weird borders, and everyone has generic focus.
• One Year War, a total conversion mod for Hearts of Iron 4 based on the Gundam franchise. Specifically focusing on the Universal Century, it currently covers the lead-up to the titular conflict up until the events of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. It's also the closest thing there is to an English-localized Gihren's Greed game.
• Road to 56 is a mod that is based around expansion of the tech tree into the The '50s and the addition of a lot of new focus trees of variable quality & power. The most popular mod for the game that doesn't involve alternative timelines, being based upon other works of fiction or wholesale changes to the mechanics. Well known in the community for its Honduran meme focus tree, which can result in country becoming a literal "Banana Republic" and owned by the United Fruit Company, or going even further and becoming a Privately Owned Society Anarcho-Capitalist nation called "The Free Enterprise Zone".
• Stahlvorhang, a mod in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War, but made peace with the Soviet Union, which is now its ally.
• The Sun Shining on the World, an alt-history mod for Hearts of Iron 4 that's set in a world where the Axis achieves a total victory in the Second World War...only that it's Imperial Japan rather than Nazi Germany that's the dominant power, though everything still goes From Bad to Worse.
• Unification Wars allows you to unite Holy Terra under the Emperor, knocking heads of techno-barbarians and setting the path for the Imperium of Man to rise up and reunite all of humanity throughout the galaxy... or try your best opposing the Big Guy and his increasingly more deadly arsenal.
• War of The Worlds: a mod that adds the Martians from H.G. Wells' classic novel as an additional faction to either play as or fight against. Interestingly, one of the starting points for the campaign in this mod is October 31st, 1938, the same date when the Martians invaded in the infamous radio teleplay by Orson Wells.