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I decided to search through the overhaul page yesterday to find something new to play, and i didnt want to play with space age - after disabling the space age category, there were a *multitude* of mods that were still visible that required space age to run or were based around its mechanics.
So i wanted to ask if a change could be made, so that any mod that depends on the space age mod would also get the space age ‘sticker’?
here are some images/video i took yesterday to illustrate my point, if it helps :]

+1 I was surprised to realize that hard dependencies didn't pass on the sticker

Related:
viewtopic.php?t=126971
viewtopic.php?t=128597

Tl;dr it's more work on the backend, especially navigating the full dependency tree, but hopefully they can add it eventually.

robot256 wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 5:40 pm Tl;dr it's more work on the backend, especially navigating the full dependency tree, but hopefully they can add it eventually.

I don't think it would need to navigate the full dependency tree, just slap the label whenever a mod is uploaded that adds a dependency with the label or enables a flag, and it'll take care of itself because those mods already went through the same process.

Does mean you also need to update dependents if a mod changes whether it is a dlc mod and that will need to be recursive. I'm imagining an event system that just raises more events.


This isn't to say it'll be easy. I know nothing about how the backend is structured.

PennyJim wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 6:21 pm

robot256 wrote: Tue Jul 15, 2025 5:40 pm Tl;dr it's more work on the backend, especially navigating the full dependency tree, but hopefully they can add it eventually.

I don't think it would need to navigate the full dependency tree, just slap the label whenever a mod is uploaded that adds a dependency with the label or enables a flag, and it'll take care of itself because those mods already went through the same process.

Does mean you also need to update dependents if a mod changes whether it is a dlc mod and that will need to be recursive. I'm imagining an event system that just raises more events.

This isn't to say it'll be easy. I know nothing about how the backend is structured.

We're saying the same thing with different words. Recursively propagating flags through the database on upload and during uodates is a way of caching the results of navigating every mod's dependency tree. It's not really useful for us to speculate about implementation here.

The main point of the thread is that we want a search option that answers the question, "Will my friend without the DLC be able to join my server if I use this mod and all its hard dependencies?"

I'll lend my +1 to this as well.

Curiously, the "Space Age" tag does have some utility in its current incarnation, in that it can often indicate when a mod utilises DLC mechanics or requires the DLC for some other reason (e.g. Turbo Belt), but otherwise doesn't depend on the main space-age overhaul.

But yes, it should communicate clearly to any prospective user whether or not they need to own the DLC to use the mod.

More generally, in the event that future DLCs are added, the feature_flags from all of a mods required dependencies (recursively) should be OR'd together when calculating which of the DLC flags should be displayed next to its Portal entry.