An external front-office / GM tool for a College Football 27 dynasty. It runs alongside the game as its own Windows app and takes over recruiting, the transfer portal, coaching moves, NIL, and player development, while CFB27 keeps doing what it does best: playing and simulating games.
The app opens your real dynasty save, reads it directly, and writes your decisions back into it when you commit them. There is no separate universe to keep in sync, and no re-entering your roster or your class by hand.
Current release: 0.306. Both halves ship together: the installer and
Dynasty-Engine-v0.301.fbmod.
This is alpha software. Do not start a dynasty you care about in this tool yet.
I would normally keep a build in this state private. I am sharing it because I have spent a long stretch building it with nobody looking at it, and I do not yet have enough people involved to get the feedback I need before committing to serious tuning and refinement. That feedback is the entire reason this release exists.
What that means concretely:
- Systems are brittle, and a full season can break while I am making changes this rapidly. It may very well break along the way.
- Numbers are untuned. NIL prices, commit odds, portal behavior, and generation targets are first-pass values chosen to be reasonable, not values that have been balanced against many simulated seasons.
- Data can break between versions. The tool keeps its own per-dynasty database alongside your save, and its shape is still changing. Migrations exist, but at this stage I will discard that data rather than carry a bad structure forward, which has already happened.
- Back up your save yourself before you point the app at it, even though the app also backs it up on every write.
The right way to use 0.306 is to look around, break things, and tell me what is wrong.
| Go here | For |
|---|---|
| Install and first run | Requirements, the mod, the app, the startup gate |
| How it works | The two halves, the side database, and the design rules every system follows |
| The season | The calendar, the weekly loop, and what happens at every step |
| The mechanics manual | |
| Recruiting | The board, influence, offers, promises, and how a recruit actually picks a school |
| Scouting | Letter-grade bands, beats, reports, hunches, and where the value hides |
| NIL and the budget | Real dollars: the pool, asks, offer postures, contracts, growth |
| Bidding wars | The endgame: sealed rounds, Best and Final, and Over the Top |
| The transfer portal | Departures, entry motives, the market, and where players land |
| The roster | Playing time, development, five-year eligibility, and Cutdown Day |
| Coaching | Expectations, your seat, staff grades, the carousel, and legacy |
| Rankings | The external Top 25 committee and the playoff forecast |
| The CPU league | How every other program behaves, and the Hand of God |
| Data safety | What gets written to your save, and how the Vault protects it |
| Glossary | Every term the app uses, in one place |
| Everything else | |
| Roadmap | The phase plan and what is coming |
| Releases | Downloads: the installer and the mod |
| Report a bug | Prefer the in-app Report Bug button, it attaches diagnostics for you |
| Ask a question | Prefer the in-app Ask Question button |
| Request a feature | Prefer the in-app Request Feature button |
| Usage terms | What you may and may not do with the build |
CFB27's on-field game is deep, but the game as a whole is designed to support multiple teams, multiple users, and jumping around without anything breaking. I think a single-player-focused experience that sacrifices some of that flexibility for depth could be very rewarding.
This is a single-team project. It is built to let you take new jobs inside your dynasty, but not to run several programs at once. That may change later.
Dynasty Engine is not a companion dashboard you glance at. It is meant to be opened at the start of every week of your dynasty, and it replaces a large amount of what you would otherwise be doing inside CFB27.
The loop, in order, every week:
- Open Dynasty Engine and load your save. Pulse, the landing screen, is the week brief: what needs a decision from you this week, plus a wire of everything that moved since last time.
- Do the front-office work here. Scouting beats, sorting the board, cutting NIL offers, making and grading promises, working the portal during its window, retention, coaching moves. None of it happens in the game anymore.
- Commit, then close the app. Every decision that touches the save is explicit and previewable, and the app checkpoints both halves (your save and its own database) before writing. The app never writes to your save on its own while you are away.
- Go back to CFB27, play or sim the week, and save in-game.
- Come back to Dynasty Engine for the next week.
Both directions of that loop matter. The app is the only place recruiting happens, because the mod zeroes the game's recruiting and scouting hours. And the game is the only place football happens, because Dynasty Engine does not simulate games at all.
If you skip weeks in the tool, the engine catches up when you next open it, but it catches up without you: offers you never filed were never on the table, visit windows you never used are gone, and recruits commit elsewhere without you having had a say. Nothing is lost silently, but opportunities pass.
What the tool owns now instead of the game: all recruiting and scouting, all scholarship offers, all NIL (in real dollars, since the game's own NIL numbers are zeroed on purpose), who enters the transfer portal and where they land, coaching-carousel moves, the offseason roster cutdown, and player development between seasons.
What the game still owns: everything on the field, plus the roster, the schedule, and the results the tool reads back out of your save.
Dynasty Engine is two halves, and you need both.
The mod (Dynasty-Engine-v0.301.fbmod) is small, and everything it does is
about getting the game's own systems out of the way so the app can own them:
- It zeroes the weekly hours coaches spend on in-game recruiting and scouting, so the game's click-to-recruit loop has nothing to spend and recruiting only happens through the app.
- It retunes recruit generation down to the archetype. The game's own generator still produces every prospect, but the mod reshapes the star ratings it hands out so position value looks like real recruiting: roughly 32 five-stars and 368 four-stars per class, no one-star filler (those players are folded into the two-star tier as real attribute uplift, not relabeled), and a floor raise for six under-served states.
- It renames and repurposes three coach talent trees so what you are buying reads correctly.
- It suppresses in-game player XP, because player progression is the app's job now and it should not be decided in two places at once.
- It raises the game's redshirt threshold past where it can be crossed, so every player gets five seasons to play across five years, matching the incoming real-CFB 2027 rule.
Games and on-field simulation are untouched vanilla CFB27.
The app does everything else: it parses your save, layers a persistent per-dynasty database on top for everything the save does not track, turns off player-initiated transfers, clears in-game NIL so no stray number implies the game is still handling it, and writes every decision back explicitly, previewable first and checkpointed automatically.
The startup gate. The app checks that the mod is actually in force in the save you opened and refuses to open one where it is not. That check is not cosmetic: without the mod, the game's own recruiting is still running and the two systems would fight over the same class.
→ Full detail in How it works.
Every system in the manual follows the same five rules. If a mechanic ever seems to break one, that is a bug worth reporting.
- You see what a GM would actually know. Recruits are graded in bands and qualitative reads, never a raw hidden number pretending to be certainty. Rostered and portal players, who you would genuinely know the truth about, show real numbers.
- Real dollars, not an invented currency. NIL is priced in actual dollars against a real budget, because program wealth is a real-world fact the game does not model.
- Consequences are real. Declined offers, broken promises, and lost recruiting battles stay lost. The Vault protects you against bugs and mistakes, not against the outcomes of your own decisions.
- Agency over guardrails. Where a decision is legal but unwise, the tool warns you and then lets you do it. It will tell you a promise is not backed by your depth chart. It will not stop you making it.
- Everything is explainable and repeatable. Every outcome has a visible cause, and every roll is seeded, so the same save advanced the same way produces the same story.
I write the vision docs, the requirements, and the test cases myself, then lean heavily on AI coding to build from them. There is no way I could write all of this code on my own.
Use the buttons in the app. The left sidebar has a Community section with Ask Question, Report Bug, and Request Feature. Report Bug is the important one: it bundles diagnostics (and optionally your save and dynasty database) into a folder, then opens the issue form so you can attach them. A bug report with that bundle is worth several without it.
If you cannot get the app open at all, file it here directly: bug · question · feature
This is the public side of the project: downloads, docs, issues, and discussions. All the documentation lives as markdown in docs/, versioned with the release it describes, so you can always read the docs as they were for the build you are running. The app's source lives in a separate private repo. This one exists so anyone can get the tool and find answers without needing access to the source.
Usage terms are in LICENSE.md. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Electronic Arts.