Sure, there are Steam charts and sales milestones, but for my money, the way to tell that a PC game has made it is by checking to see whether it has a Thomas the Tank Engine mod. There are Thomas mods for Skyrim and Sekiro and countless other PC classics, and now there’s one for Cyberpunk 2077.
This is not exactly the way we had anticipated Thomas showing up in a Cyberpunk 2077 mod, however. The Thomas DeShawn mod swaps out Night City fixer Dex DeShawn’s head with the plucky blue steam engine, giving Dex a pleasant – if unsettlingly static – permanent smile.
What we’d been hoping for was a Thomas the Tank Engine mod that somehow builds on Night City’s abandoned monorail system, which a redditor discovered shortly after the open-world game launched late last year. Imagine Thomas and friends serenely gliding above the grimy, glitchy streets below, unaware of and unbothered by the power struggles roiling within the Arasaka Corporation. Instead, you’ll wind up striking a deal with Thomas to raid Konpeki Plaza to steal the Relic chip.
Head to Nexus Mods to download Thomas DeShawn. You’ll want to unpack the zip file and copy the modded .archive file into a folder within your Cyberpunk 2077 game files called \archive\pc\patch, which you’ll need to create if you don’t already have one.
Modder camtino says the mod is “still a bit bugged” but that they’ll “fix some issues tomorrow, most likely” – which seems fair, all things considered.
Fortunately, you shouldn’t have to worry about installing mods any more – CD Projekt Red has released a hotfix to address some modding-related security issues that cropped up after the RPG game’s last patch, so you’ll be able to hang with Thomas DeShawn (mostly) worry-free.