Mod Loadouts.

[SamuelCombrinck]

Dear Factorio Staff and players:

Recently I have been playing on multiple saves and ran into the tedious problem of having all the right mods active for a particular save/server.

Save Example -Image

Save example 1.PNG (578.15 KiB) Viewed 2249 times

Server Example -Image

Server Example 1.PNG (427.15 KiB) Viewed 2249 times

My current solution to this is having multiple mod-list.json files and copying them around to switch between mod "loadouts".

My mod-list.json loadouts -Image

Loadouts Example 1.PNG (177.65 KiB) Viewed 2249 times

Modded And Vanilla loadouts -Images

Modded 1.PNG (255.72 KiB) Viewed 2249 times

Vanilla 1.PNG (267.36 KiB) Viewed 2249 times

However my system is not perfect, and I feel sorry for those who often manually change between saves/servers with large amounts of mods.

The solution and my humble proposition, is that there's a mod loadout system added to Factorio. (This is somewhat beyond the scope of a mod)
It will allow you to create and switch between loadouts and therefor saves/servers with different mods easily.

This can be implemented relatively easily and in a variety of ways.
The way I will do it (if it was up to me) is by letting each loadout create it's own "mod-list.json" file and then switching between "active" files.
This will allow easy shearing and management of loadouts, with the files usually being only a few KB in size. And it already partially works if done manually.
If using this approach then the missing mods in a loadout can be marked "unusable" similar to mods with missing dependencies, and downloaded in a similar way to currently downloading updated mods.
However I fully understand that implementation (including if it will be implemented or not) is entirely up to the developers, and that my way of doing it is not necessarily the best way of doing it.

Hope you enjoy the idea, and have a nice day/night.
Feel free to let me know what you think.

Sincerely yours.

Samuel

[Sigma1]

I want this so bad too. Actually made a bash script that did a similar thing but it was buggy and inefficient.

[ssilk]

Hm. That reminds me/has many similarities with the repository idea I had. For discussion purpose I point to it:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=43357&p=252606&hili ... ry#p252147

[aober93]

Why not use batch files for that like i do? Instead of starting the executable directly, have a batch file that first replaces the mod folder with the wanted mod loadout, and then starts the game.

I have several batch files for multiple mod loadouts, including "vanilla". But there is certainly also the possibility to have it display dialog options inside a single batch file. But atm i only have 4 loadouts so thats not a big deal.

[Engimage]

Actually and idea with mod loadouts is awesome. Simple to implement and clear to understand. You can call it a profile and group it with some extra settings that might apply and switch between them in game as you see fit.
You could also download the loadout from the multiplayer server as a "temporary" set to be able to join it instantly. I know something like this is making its way into 0.15 but new ideas are never bad.