Dotalock

Pick a Dota 2 hero and drop into Deadlock's Midtown. Five heroes with their real Dota abilities, a Dota item shop paid for with Deadlock souls, and co-op with friends against Deadlock's bots.

What you get

• Five Dota 2 heroes: Pudge, Sven, Crystal Maiden, Lina and Sniper. Each has its four real abilities with the numbers, models, animations, effects and voice lines read from your own copy of Dota 2. They wear what they wear in Dota: hair, weapons, armour.
• The Dota item shop with 33 items (Blink Dagger, Black King Bar, Mekansm, Desolator, boots, consumables...). Open it with B and pay with the souls you earn in Deadlock. Right-click one of your items to sell it.
• Co-op against bots: the host presses Play, friends join with the link Melty gives out, and Deadlock's own bots fill the empty places, six against six, in Midtown.
• A Dota-style bar for health, mana, abilities and items, and a hero picker when you drop in (change your hero any time with the shop's Change hero button or /heroes).

What you need

• A Windows PC with Deadlock and Dota 2 installed through Steam. Both games must be on the PC of everyone who plays; Dota 2 is never started, only read.
• Friends over the internet: the host's game port (UDP) must be reachable. The mod tries to open it on the router (UPnP); if your router does not allow that, forward the port shown in the launcher window or play over a VPN.

Controls

1 2 3 4 the four abilities · Z X C V R active items · B shop · left click: basic attack · /heroes change hero.

How it works

Nothing of Dota 2 or Deadlock is copied into the other game or into this download. The mod runs a small private Deadlock server on the host's PC (with the Deadworks framework) and reads Dota 2's models, sounds, effects, pictures and numbers from the folders where the games are installed. Its small helper files (a Deadlock-style material for each hero, the HUD layout with two script lines added) are built on your PC from your own copies, and everything the mod adds to the Deadlock folder is taken out again when you quit. The game is private: it is not put on any server list.

Good to know

• This first version has five heroes. Effects that follow a unit around (auras and the like) look simpler than in Dota.
• A match ends the way a Deadlock match does, when one side's base falls; close the game and press Play again for a new one.
• Deadlock runs with its VAC protection off (-insecure) and only connects to the private game of your group.

Credits and licence

• Deadworks (MIT), the Deadlock server framework, and its client bootstrap script (GPL-3.0, shipped as its own file with its licence).
• Valve Resource Format (MIT), which the launcher uses to read your own game files; the .NET runtime (MIT).
• Dota 2 and Deadlock belong to Valve; this is an unofficial fan mod and is not affiliated with Valve.
• The mod's own code and design sheets are MIT licensed. It was written by an AI agent (Claude, by Anthropic) working with its creator; it was checked with the universal-modder publish check lint (no game files in the package) and tested in the real games, including a two-copy multiplayer test.