In June 2022, a new Reddit user named SadFutago joined the Nier Automata subreddit to ask what might seem to outsiders a fairly innocuous question: "How do you open the church?"
Their post was short and sweet, seemingly coming from a confused, not-exactly-internet-savvy gamer who wanted to know how to access a building in Nier: Automata that, they claimed, was closed off for their friend, but open for them. The problem? There was no such church in Nier: Automata, to anyone's knowledge. Dataminers had never heard of it. It didn’t exist in any guide, or video, or older build known to anyone in the audience. And as more information, and later images and clips came out of this location no one had ever seen before, the Nier subreddits, Discords, and eventually wider gaming communities went into a frenzy trying to solve the mystery of the never-before-seen church.
SadFutago kicked off a beautiful mess of a multi-month storyline that twisted the community, media, and even expert modders into knots. It eventually bled out of the Nier community it started in, reaching major media sites and mainstream gaming communities. Even Nier creator Yoko Taro himself got involved.
The “church saga” as it came to be known turned out to be an elaborate build-up to announce brand new modding tools for Nier: Automata that stand to revolutionize what modders can do with the game’s world and was largely orchestrated on the fly by three individuals who didn’t go into the saga with any elaborate schemes. They were just regular modders who made some cool stuff, and whose fun tease of the community spiraled far beyond what they had ever intended.
We tracked down the trio of creators behind SadFutago to get the true tale behind the Nier church saga. This is the Inside Story of how they tricked the internet into believing there were still meaningful secrets left hidden in one of the most exciting and existential RPGs of the last decade.
Chapter 1: Significance
The Nier: Automata church saga was the work of three individuals, but it began with just one, a modder going by Woeful_Wolf.
“I'm just a gamer who wanted more from the games I played,” Woeful_Wolf explains. “So since I was young, I started tinkering with them and seeing what I can break.”
Woeful began his modding career years ago with Source engine games, such as Half-Life 2, and picked up a lot of his programming knowledge from Gary's Mod. Prior to Nier: Automata, he had been tinkering around with Skyrim and Fallout, but eventually arrived at the Nier series thanks to his love of JRPGs. He first picked up Nier: Automata in 2019, two years after its initial release. And while he was having a good time, he began to feel bothered by small details in the game that didn't seem right to him.
“There's a cosmetic item called the Luna Tear that you can have placed in 2B's or A2's hair, and what bothered me about this cosmetic is that it was actually pretty 2D,” he says. “It was just these flat planes, the petals of the leaves, and it was such a minor thing, but I would like more of a 3D flower. So I started looking at the 3D model formats for the flower.”
Before Woeful had even finished a normal playthrough of Nier: Automata, he was already tinkering around with modeling program Blender plugins and addons to improve the issues he had found. With the help of Bayonetta modder Kerilk, he began to create the tools that would eventually form the basis for the church project.
Once he got going, Woeful largely worked alone on the tools, but would sometimes solicit support from friends in the community when he made an interesting discovery. Enter our second church modder: DevolasRevenge.
“The only reason why I got into it was because I just thought about how cool it would be to mod Nier: Automata,” Devolas tells me. “It's the first game that I modded, and it was only two years ago.”
Devolas’ modding talents were a perfect support for Woeful. He could take advantage of the tools Woeful made, point out pain points and stretch their capabilities. Since the two were already friends, it was a no-brainer to reach out to Devolas when Woeful got a powerful new set of tools working for Nier: Automata.
“I said, ‘Hey, I've got map collision and prop placing and things like that working, would you like to test it before I release?’” Woeful explains. “And [Devolas] suggested we don't release. We have to play a little prank on the community.”
Chapter 2: Amusement Park
But before we get to Woeful and Devola’s prank, we first need to understand exactly what was so revolutionary about what they had made.
If you’re not familiar with modding, things like “map collision” and “prop placing” might just sound like gibberish. But while the actual efforts behind their work were quite complicated, what Woeful and Devola were doing is actually pretty simple in principle. Basically, Woeful had created a set of modding tools that could be used to play around with the game engine of Nier: Automata, and Devola was using those tools to add in all sorts of elements to his copy that would never be present in a regular copy of the game.
Before Woeful Wolf made his discovery, the abilities of modders like Devola were actually pretty limited, because the scripting tools for complex changes simply didn’t exist yet.
“Before 2019, we couldn't have custom models,” Woeful says. “We could have rudimentary character swaps, which was just swapping the names of two characters and having it load there, but we couldn't have custom weapons or custom outfits or things in that, and then the next step was we could have custom map geometry. So visually, we could change the map, but we didn't have collisions yet. So you could add a building or a wall or a statue to the middle of the map somewhere, but the player would just phase right through. Same with enemies, there would be no collision or path finding.”
In short, Nier: Automata modders prior to Woeful had the tools to add custom characters or weapons or outfits to the game, and could even edit the game's maps to add objects or walls or enemies that wouldn't be there normally. But if you tried to interact with them, nothing would happen, and the player would simply walk right through whatever was added. Fun to look at, sure, but not exactly immersive.
That’s where Woeful's new tools came in. His work allowed Devolas to make the church not just look real, but feel real too, full of solid objects you can run into and, you know, actual floors and walls. But to hear Woeful tell it, brilliant as his tools were, they weren’t especially easy for modders like Devolas to use.
Which is where the third member of the church trio ended up accidentally, but fortuitously involved: RaiderB.
“I'm a computer science student from Germany, and I discovered this game Nier: Automata actually only recently about half a year ago,” says RaiderB. “At the beginning of the year I looked at the modding tools and what there is, and yeah. I started experimenting around with a couple of new things yeah that haven't been really done before.”
Raider's experiments involved, you guessed it, collisions. He eventually got something coded up that eliminated invisible walls in the game, effectively allowing you to go anywhere without restriction. But when he began to let others know he had something in the works, Woeful and Devolas took notice. They reached out to convince him to hold off on releasing his work, but at first, they were coy as to exactly what they had in the works.
“When I joined, I actually didn't really know what the secret was,” Raider explains. “I only knew that there was a ‘secret’, but not what it was. It was only I think like in May or something that I started asking, ‘When is the secret coming out?’ That I got more and more involved into the actual work of it.”
Raider is humble about his contributions, but to hear Woeful and Devolas tell it, the entire church mod wouldn't have been possible without his work. His scripting discoveries made the tools easier to use, and eventually went beyond just invisible walls, pulling together the overall immersion of the whole church:
“Before in Automata, no one would ever imagine you'd be able to change NPC dialogue, spawn them in a unique place, and then have completely different actions happening,” Devolas says.