Mod Manager Additional Features

[Insanity_Prelude]

The in-game Mod Manager is really amazing, but it's missing a few features I'd consider critical that I'd love to see. If anything, it being as good as it is is almost a problem, because unlike most games, I've never seen significant efforts to create a third-party mod manager that would solve some of these issues.

1. Access to mod manager before the game loads.

I know this one should be possible because it already happens if there is an irresolvable problem during prototype loading. Even just adding a tiny function that deliberately causes such a crash would suffice. As it stands, when I boot my game intending to play one modlist but I had last played a different one, my only recourse is to load the entire game at least twice. If I wanted to also update my mods or add an additional mod to the list it's at least three times.

2. Mod profiles

Right now, there's a pretty solid solution built in that synchronizes your modlist (and some settings) with an existing save. This is pretty clunky though for a variety of reasons. First off, as listed above, this requires you to load your entire game and modlist just to access the menu that lets you change it. It also means you need to permanently maintain a save with the specific mods you want, and if you want to update it, you have to load the game and save it again, or else make a new world to save in.

A much better solution for this would be to add a small interface to the Mod Manager that lets a player save backups of their mod-list.json. Storing additional named mod-list JSONs in a subfolder, then allowing users to select from and overwrite their existing mod-list with one of the backups, would be extremely nice. Considering that the current alternative is either loading your game a bunch or maintaining multiple duplicate installs and manually launching the correct one, I'd really love to see something along these lines implemented.

3. Maintaining older versions of mods when updating

As a weirdo who maintains several different saves, I sometimes want to update my mods without overwriting previous versions, so I can keep a save running older versions of a mod. As far as I can tell, almost the entire feature already exists and is implemented, because the mod manager lets you choose between installed versions of a mod. The only piece I'd really love to see added is a toggle either per-mod or for an entire "update selected" operation which would skip deleting the previous version of the mod so that it can still be used in other saves. I confess, I'm not actually sure whether "Sync Mods to Save" will prefer older versions if they're a better match, but if not that would probably be necessary to ensure mod updates don't break a save.

4. Modlist-specific save folders

I suppose this is almost unrelated, so I hope it doesn't seem off-topic. The Save and Load interface handles folders in a really nice way, which is to say that you can use them. Autosaves always wind up in the parent folder which is a bit annoying, and there's no interface to make folders or move saves between them, but it's still cool that it's there. What I'd really love to see as a sort of stretch-goal bonus to Item 2 above if we're dreaming big, is that I'd love it if the "mod-list" interface would also be present in the Save and Load interface, so that you could associate saves with a specific modlist by name, and then filter based on that modlist. Probably with a toggle too, but it'd be nice to be able to hunt down all of my Pyanodon's save files separately from my Bob's/Angel's or Space Exploration or Vanilla saves.

I think that's everything I can think of!

[jatmn]

I just wanted to note for #4.
You can already select a save file and hit the "Sync mods with save" button.

01-20-2026, 11-40-51.png (41.83 KiB) Viewed 134 times

[Blaster]

Additionally:

* The ability to remove specific verisons of mods

* Have the standalone server respect the modlist file, instead of arbitrarily loading every mod in the mods folder