Factorio Forums

Hi, I did a search and got to many hits for unzip, so I'm making a post even though I'm SURE you've been asked this 100 times.

Does unzipping mods make them,

1. Load faster when you load the game?

2. Run smoother in game?

Thanks!

DM

2) it definitely won't run differently in game, since once it finishes loading all the big files are in memory, and once you start the game so are all the little files too.

1) Haven't compared loading speed, but I can't imagine it making much difference. PNG graphics don't really compress much in a zip, so it's about the same number of bytes to read from disk either way and not much cpu work to decompress. The advantages of keeping your mods zipped are that you don't have to do anything aside from the mod portal, and you're more likely to match the mod checksums of others in multiplayer.

Thank-you that was a great answer!

DM

There are several other advantages for developers.

First, it is possible to have a zipped version and unzipped version in the same mods folder. Factorio will ignore the zipped version and use the unzipped version. This can be used test changes. Second is that it is much harder to make changes to a .zip file, at least on Win10 then an unzipped file.

My recommendation is to play with your mods zipped. This way you have a way to easily update your downloaded mods as developers post their updates from within the client.

Hiladdar

Unzipping the mods will likely make game loading significantly slower. Opening hundreds of different files is significantly slower due to operating system overhead than opening a single .zip and reading it from start to finish.

In the early days, having the mod as files was fast.

however, some optimisations were done a while back, and since then, loading zipped mods is faster. Probably around the time the mod portal was established.

Q: If mods load faster when zipped, why isn't Base mod in some sort of archive file?