I've found a MF discord and Steam group, and it seems nobody has done any mods for this game, and it doesn't seem friendly to it. I've spent yesterday and today trawling the internet for details on it, because I want to get the 3D meshes extracted so I could resin print myself some tiny Combots.
There is a program you can find called Watto's Game Extractor, and that lead got me a little further in. It was able to look inside the .TBD files, but I'm not sure where to go from there. As far as I can tell, a TBD file is an archive, and it has many smaller files in it, most of which are marked as OFFS and IMPT files. No sources I've been able to find w Google, Bing, Internet Archive, or the forums from those searches can say what a TBD, OFFS, or IMPT file is. One thread I found mentioned that the IMPT might be a filetype for the modelling software Lightwave 3D. There was mention of an interview (now a broken link) with Zono software saying they used lightwave to create the objects. Version 6 was the current version of lightwave at the time it was made and released.
Still no luck.
I'm following several leads, hopefully one of them might help me crack my goal of model extraction. 3D Ripper DX, Ninja Ripper, Lightwave 3D 6.5, Watto's Game Extractor.
Big infodump to say modding is probably not happening unless Nightdive does a full remaster. Hopefully my slightly smaller scope goal can be reached. LMK if you found any other substantial leads!