Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make an option to choose mods before the game actually starts. Also make an option to create local mod packs to start game with.

What ?

Make some sort of mods chooser that launches before the game and allows us to choose mods we want ot play with. Also make an option to create you own bunches of mods to mark them to be loaded with a single click.

Why ?

When you have lots of mods and want to disable them to be able to play vanilla you have to wait for a long time for game to load. Then you just disable mods and you have to reload the entire game. Also right now you have to keep modpacks in a separate folders and replace them manually to switch between them.

It's already on the road map AFAIK ...

FFF#200 1.16 plans

The bigger things are:
Mod portal improvement (rewrite)

I'm not about mod portal. But the mod loader in the game.

The mod portal is how the devs refer to the in game mod loader because the mod portal website and the in game mod portal use the same API but different GUIs to give you access to the same things.

I suggest you read this and necro the relevent linked posts on improvements to the mod portal viewtopic.php?f=80&t=27805

A Minecraft-style launcher is a neat idea, but adds bloat. At the moment the only way to get what OP wants is manually moving or editing the modlist JSON file.

A launcher might also solve some problems with saving/loading mod startuo settings when changing mod packs, but that's a separate discussion.

The game has the option to sync mods with a save in the GUI. But I see no command line option for this.

Maybe it would be enough to have:
That would extract the mod config from the save and start factorio with that. Making dummy saves for different mod packs is easy enough.

You can use different mods.json files on startup, which will be written after mods-update. And different mods folders.

ssilk wrote: ↑Sat Nov 20, 2021 12:33 am You can use different mods.json files on startup, which will be written after mods-update. And different mods folders.

Mod folder sure. But then I need to maintain N copies of the mods.

How do I use just different mods.json files?

Either by creating as many Factorio folders, or by exchanging them.

Nobody said this is simple, but it works. And there is more than one way to do it.

As said, more than 50% ready and how the remaining parts should work is not clear. There are dozens of ideas, but none of them look what’s already possible and how can we continue from here.

And this comes together with a low game-play value, might increase complexity , not so much used functionality and high to very high development costs.