I distinctly remember mine; the happy product of chance combined with energetic amateur skill.

Had just finished installing SS2 from Home Of The Underdogs and running the then-current SS2Tool. Hadn't had DromEd a single day, didn't have a damn clue about the games internal structure.  I stumbled on the fact that the files were just renamed ZIP archives by complete accident.

Started rooting around in DromEd on the Earth level, found out the model name of the phone booths and opened it with a hex editor. Managed to find the name of the sound file it used when frobbed, changed it, put a renamed song from Sonic 3D Blast in the right folder.

My excitement as I fired up the game was only matched by my outright jubilation when I heard the 'new' sound playing from the phone, EAX enhancements and all. It was caveman-crude...but it worked...and I had done it entirely on my own. 

I miss that kind of pure, youthful excitement more than words can tell. This and similar moments with SS2 were some of the last truly happy times I had for a very long time.

What was your first foray into modding?

I made Ancient (the fan mission), which started out as an experiment in remaking my favourite of the Doom 2 levels I'd released a decade-ish earlier. Went in thinking oh this'll take a month to get done. Ended up taking 4-5 months roughly.

It's a shame that we never get any new ones nowadays.

Just some thing:
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75328&p=908855&viewfull=1#post908855

some thing

the mod would be legal to drink alcohol around the parts where I live. well, almost.

I started modding SS2 last year, heh. I believe my first change was removing Standard Weapons skill damage scaling from the wrench, because it's dumb. In order to do this via DML (since I can't rearrange the object hierarchy), I had to remove the damage scaling property from the parent Standard archetype and then add it back to each gun. I felt pretty clever at the time, but that's baby stuff to me now.

There's really no better time than the present to start modding SS2, I'm disappointed there hasn't been more interest. NewDark has so much crazy stuff, from expanded ShockEd limits and new graphical features to DML injection and squirrel scripts compiled at runtime. The documentation is quite good, too. I guess people just don't care about SS2 these days.

Eh. I've dabbled around in ShockEd over the years but haven't really put enough time in to make anything substantial.

I've tried basically everything anyone else has made over the years, though!