Crusader Kings III Silk & Silver dev diary #9 covers 3D art, music and modding

Paradox Development Studio has posted the ninth dev diary for Crusader Kings III’s Silk & Silver expansion, on 3 November 2026. It covers 3D art, animation, music and audio, and modding. The 2D art section has been held back for a second part. Paradox notes that all screenshots are work-in-progress and everything is subject to change.

Clothes, hats and pack animals

The expansion adds 88 barbershop items: 28 clothes, 45 headgear, 14 cloaks and one hair style (Face Framing Braids). They span Western, Middle Eastern and North African, and Sogdian/Chinese looks, from wool on porters to a full ceremonial Venetian doge outfit with three versions of the corno ducale. Volto carnival masks are in for festivals.

There are also two new animals, the donkey and the dromedary, which show up as portrait props and map units. Each comes bare, saddled or packed for travel.

Animation and the map

Over 25 new animations are included. Characters can pet, ride and lead donkeys and dromedaries, eat on the road, and juggle, sing or throw coins at carnivals. Caravans now travel the trade routes, with donkey and ox carts and horse-drawn wagons.

Cities grow with culture-specific sprawl patterns, and each district’s main resource shows on the map. There are trade hub entrepôts, and Venice gets the Doge’s Palace, the Basilica of San Marco, the Arsenal, the Campanile and animated gondolas. Paris uses a single model for the whole period, and players can build Notre Dame over the earlier basilica.

Audio and music

Around 20 new event backgrounds are added, including carnival scenes and new full-screen Guelph-Ghibelline events. Settlement Size, introduced with the expansion, also rolls out to the base game, with audio that scales across 10 size levels.

Magnus Ringblum returns with a new main theme, new cues and 8 mood tracks. The score leans on Italian flavours with ties to India and China trade, using instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy, bansuri, pipa, guzheng and dizi.

Modding

Trade is built almost entirely from data that modders can extend: goods, categories, toll levels and trade tasks. Holdings are now built from districts, with buildings inside them, and roads (tier 0 to 5) are moddable too. Paradox warns that this reworks the economy, so existing building mods will most likely break. The diary lists renames, such as development becoming prosperity and county opinion becoming popular opinion.

The free update that accompanies the expansion also adds more scope support in triggers and effects, new movement speed modifiers, and Variable Maps, a feature first made for Europa Universalis V.