Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op Mod Lets Six Players Stay Together From Start to Finish

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin now has a Seamless Co-op mod that lets up to six players stay in the same world through bosses, deaths and area transitions without rebuilding the party.

Created by Yui, the unofficial PC mod released on September 22 and overhauls the game's multiplayer around persistent sessions. NPC dialogue and progression are synchronized across the group, while invasions remain available for players who want PvP.

Standard Dark Souls II multiplayer is built around temporary summons. Clearing a boss, crossing certain multiplayer boundaries or dying can split the group and force players to reconnect before continuing.

Seamless Co-op removes most of those restrictions. Defeating a boss or clearing an area no longer dismisses co-op partners, while the usual fog walls and barriers that limit multiplayer zones have been removed.

Deaths also work differently. A player who dies respawns at the last bonfire they rested at while remaining in the host's world, rather than ending the session. The connection system has been reworked so other players can join the host from anywhere in the world using a shared password. If someone does disconnect, they can rejoin without returning to the game's normal summoning process.

A host can play with five other people in the open world, considerably expanding the size of a normal co-op group. The mod synchronizes NPC dialogue and conversation events between players. Resting at a bonfire resets the world for everyone, while progression events completed during online play also advance the same parts of each player's own world.

That changes co-op from a temporary visit into a shared playthrough. Players can move through areas, speak to NPCs and defeat bosses together without one member repeatedly returning to their own save to reproduce the same progress.

Yui has also replaced parts of Dark Souls II's original peer-to-peer system with Steam's newer networking API and rebuilt voice chat around proximity, so players hear each other based on where they are in the world.

Persistent co-op naturally makes parts of Dark Souls II easier, so Seamless Co-op includes several ways to make group runs more demanding.

Enemy scaling can be adjusted, and players cannot rest at a bonfire while another member of the party is fighting a boss. Anyone killed during a boss battle or invasion enters a spectator state until the group is defeated or another player reaches a bonfire.

Hosts can also enable an optional death system that increases enemy difficulty as players accumulate Cursed Soul Fragments. Invasions remain part of the experience. When enabled, hostile players can enter a session and attack the group, while players can also use one of the mod's new multiplayer items to invade another compatible world.

Some covenant-related invasion systems are still unfinished, including features tied to the Blue Sentinels, Bell Keepers, Rat King and other covenants.

Yui describes the current build as an alpha and warns that players should expect bugs. The mod is specifically made for the 64-bit PC version of Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin version 1.03 and does not support the original 32-bit release.

Seamless Co-op also keeps its multiplayer separate from FromSoftware's normal servers. It uses its own save-file format, preventing modded characters from directly appearing in the standard game. Yui warns against converting Seamless Co-op saves back into normal saves because doing so could risk a ban.

Updates have already followed the initial release. Version 0.0.3 arrived on September 26 with a fix for extremely low frame rates on certain CPUs and support for guest players earning Steam achievements while playing in a host's world.

Earlier patches addressed boss scaling, matchmaking, crashes and synchronization problems between players with different world states.