Installation

Intended article audience: players, general users

Installation

The only official way to freshly install TDM is described on the downloads page on website.
In short:

• Download the TDM Installer for your operating system from the downloads page on website, unpack it in a folder and run the installer.
  
• And if you want to update an existing TDM installation, see the Update article.
  

If you are using Windows and find those instructions difficult, try using the Freyk's Unofficial Installer (download from the download page).

And a large list of Official and unofficial & unsupported installation methods is provided in article Installer and Manual Installation.
If you want help after trying reading the documentation above, please ask for it on "Tech Support" subforum.

Prerequisites

Operating Systems supported

• Windows (Vista/Win7/Win8/Win10/Win11)
• Linux

Running TDM on Mac OS is unsupported, but possible in Wine.

• Note: Microsoft no longer supports Vista or Win7

General

At a minimum, you'll need a machine which is capable of running the Doom 3 game on comfortably high settings. The team recommends adding more RAM and a bit more CPU to the basic requirements, however, otherwise running the larger maps will be difficult.

See the article Known System Configurations for a growing collection of system configurations and the corresponding user feedback.

Hard Disk Space

A rough estimate of how much disk space required is 4-6 GB. As TDM is under continual development this is likely to increase slowly over time.

Breakdown of the estimate:

• Base TDM package takes around 3.5 GB of space.
• Size of one Fan Mission varies from 10 MB to 400 MB (depending on amount of custom content).
  Total size of all fan missions ever released over 15 GB, but you don't have to download them all at once =)
• You also need some space for screenshots, savegames, etc --- negligible compared to the first two points.
• Windows 10 and newer have incredibly high Disk IO consumption. We advise that you use an SSD rather than HDD if you are on Windows 10+
  ( or use RAID, a Hybrid HDD, Ramdisk software, Optane Memory, or a Flash Drive caching solution such as Primocache )

GPU Hardware

• As of TDM 2.09, only OpenGL 3.3 and newer hardware are supported
• As a general proviso, we recommend at least 512MB of Video RAM

First Startup

• Please take your time to read through The Dark Mod Gameplay article to get familiar with the game.
• TDM ships with a Training Mission which is designed to introduce you to the various gameplay elements TDM has to offer. It is recommended to play through this mission first, even if you've played other stealth games before.
• Adjust the settings in the menus if needed (like screen resolution and gameplay settings).
• See also the Performance Tweaks article to make TDM run a little bit faster if you're on a lower end machine.
• If the game doesn't start the first time, the game create logs. The following article provides more information: "Debugging TDM Systemerrors"
• In case of any problems, please read the Reporting Problem article.
• If you encounter a problem, please check the FAQ. If you can't find an answer there, you can leave a post in the TDM Support forum.

Installing and Running Fan Missions

Fan Missions can be downloaded from inside the TDM menu. Go to "New Mission" and click on "Get new missions".

Alternatively, you can go to www.thedarkmod.com to get hold of mission packages available for The Dark Mod. Each FM is contained in a PK4 file, which contains all the files necessary to run the mission. Sometimes missions also have an optional _l10n.pk4 file; these contain the content for all other languages than English.

See the full article Installing and Running Fan Missions for a detailed explanation.

See also

• FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions and their answers.
• Hosting The Dark Mod