Before you begin

ChecklistWhat you need¶

Step oneFind the real game folder¶

Everything in this guide goes into one folder: the one that contains Bendy and the Ink Machine.exe. Not a subfolder of it, not a mods folder, not SteamApps. Find it now and keep the window open.

1. A

   Step AThrough Steam

   Right-click Bendy and the Ink Machine in your Steam library, choose Manage → Browse local files. Explorer opens directly in the game folder.

2. B

   Step BBy hand

   The default Steam location on a standard Windows install is:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Bendy and the Ink Machine\

   If you installed Steam elsewhere or moved the game to a second drive, the tail of that path is the same — look for steamapps\common\Bendy and the Ink Machine\ under whichever Steam library folder you used.

3. C

   Step CConfirm you are in the right place

   The folder you want contains all of these:

   Bendy and the Ink Machine\
   ├─ Bendy and the Ink Machine.exe        <- this is the marker you are looking for
   ├─ Bendy and the Ink Machine_Data\
   │  ├─ Managed\
   │  ├─ Resources\
   │  ├─ StreamingAssets\
   │  ├─ globalgamemanagers
   │  └─ level0 ... levelN
   ├─ MonoBleedingEdge\
   ├─ UnityCrashHandler64.exe
   ├─ UnityPlayer.dll
   └─ steam_api64.dll                      <- Steam copies only

   Here is a real one, on a machine with the Steam library on a second drive. This shot is of a finished install, so it already has the BepInEx files in it — yours will not yet. What matters is that Bendy and the Ink Machine.exe is right there at the top level:

   ⤢View full size · 1752×320

Step twoBack up your save¶

Neither of these mods writes to your save file, and the Community Patch specifically makes saving safer than vanilla. But you are about to change how the game launches, and five minutes of insurance costs nothing.

Unity keeps this game's save data outside the game folder, here:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Joey Drew Studios Inc\Bendy and the Ink Machine\

Paste that into the Explorer address bar and press Enter — Windows expands %USERPROFILE% for you, so you do not need to know your own user folder name. The save itself is the file named batim.game. Copy the whole folder somewhere safe.

Step threeClear the two silent blockers¶

1. Antivirus and Windows Defender

BepInEx works by injecting a loader into the game process at launch. That is, mechanically, exactly what a lot of malware does, so heuristic scanners flag it fairly often — and some of them quarantine the DLL without telling you. The symptom is the mod appearing to do nothing at all, with no error anywhere.

If you hit that: check your antivirus quarantine log first, before assuming you installed something incorrectly. Adding the game folder as an exclusion is the usual fix. Do that on your own judgement — and if you would rather not, verify the SHA-256 checksums on the downloads page against what you actually downloaded, which tells you the file is unaltered regardless of what a heuristic thinks of it.

2. Blocked downloads

Windows tags files that came from the internet with a “mark of the web”. Extracted DLLs sometimes inherit it, and a blocked DLL will not load. To clear it: right-click the .rar file before extracting, choose Properties, and if you see an Unblock checkbox at the bottom of the General tab, tick it and click OK.

3. Any existing mods

If you have modded this game before, remove the old install first — especially another copy of BepInEx, or an older version of either of these two plugins. Two BepInEx installs in one folder produce genuinely confusing behaviour. The uninstall page lists exactly what to delete.

Step fourOptional: verify the game files first¶

If your copy of the game has been modded before, or has ever crashed hard, it is worth having Steam confirm the install is intact before you add anything to it. It takes a couple of minutes and rules out a whole category of confusing problems later.

Right-click the game in Steam → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files.