As many of you have probably gathered, World of Warcraft is simply one of the best games ever and most of the FG staff are totally absorbed by it at the moment.

If you play as well, check out these interface mods for the game. Thanks to some forward-thinking on Blizzard’s part, you can easily modify pretty much the entire “2D” interface of the game to your liking, whether you are using the PC or Mac version of the game.

Because of the immense amount of spells, abilities, and weapons available in World of Warcraft, it can be a challenge to manage them all and have them all accessible at any given time. This is where many of these interface mods come in handy, by letting you have 1 or more extra bars of shortcuts to your spells, items, and abilities. They have lots of other features as well, which I’ve outlined below. Just keep reading.

h3. “Cosmos UI”:http://www.cosmosui.org/

Cosmos’ web site lacks any decent explaination of what it is or does, unfortunately, but I found a few good links in the forum that describe it better.

“Cosmos Beginner’s Guide”:http://www.wowwiki.com/Cosmos_Beginners_Guide “Cosmos Information”:http://www.wowwiki.com/Cosmos

Cosmos adds a lot of functionality to the interface including:

* Clock - Rather than having to mouse over the icon in the upper right corner to see the time, you can have it displayed on your screen constantly. It also shows how long you’ve been playing, how long you’ve played this level, how long until your next level, the average rate at which you are gaining experience, and a lot more.
* Second Bar - A second hotkey bar is added just above the default one, giving you twice as many shortcuts to your items, spells, and abilities.
* Sidebar - 2 Sidebars appear on either side of your screen, allowing for even more shortcuts. Makes it easy to group one side bar to healing, one to buffs/debuffs, etc.
* Popbar - Another, more powerful shortcut bar to the right of the “Second bar”, which when clicked, pops up even more options.

Those are the main features, but there are a couple dozen additional add-ons that can do almost anything else you can imagine.

One is an alarm and timer so you can remind yourself to go to bed before the sun comes up. Another displays detailed stats on how many dodges, parries, misses, etc you make. MooBuffMod will display countdown timers under your buffs so you can see exactly when they will expire without having to mouse over them. There is a quest tracker to easily track the progress of your quests without opening the quests menu.

There are many other add-ons which are listed “here”:http://www.wowwiki.com/Cosmos_AddOns. They all look really great and useful!

h3. “CTMod”:http://wow.warcraftstrategy.com/ctmod/

The CTMod is similar to Cosmos in that it adds extra bars and hotkeys, but it’s not modular like Cosmos is. Regardless, it features extra shortcut bars, renamable bags, buff countdown timers, and the ability to click on the map, create a note, and even send that note to another player.

h3. “GypsyMod”:http://gypsymod.the-mad.net/?id=features

Again, similar to the first two, this one is modular and also allows you to click and drag any interface element to any location you please on the screen, except for the mini-map. Checkout the “FAQ”:http://gypsymod.the-mad.net/?id=faq and “screenshots”:http://gypsymod.the-mad.net/images/screenshots/

It looks to me like Cosmos is the most full featured of the three, and there may be more out there that I don’t know about. I haven’t installed these yet, but will be sure to when I get home this evening. So you should all install them too, or I’ll have a big advantage over all of you!