Factorio Forums

There have been a few times where I want to depend on a specific Factorio version, whether it's because of an API method that was added or changed, a new prototype type was made, or any other thing that would make backwards compatibility broken.
There have also been a few times where I've made a mod that doesn't rely on the base mod to exist, even though you can't turn it off through normal means.

Naturally, a few times out of a few times I've done both at the same time, and want to depend on a specific Factorio version without having a dependency on the base mod. Why is that a problem? Well, maybe if some extremely ambitious modder makes a mod that disables base entirely and does it's own separate thing, I'd still want my mod to be able to be used. Sure, it's unlikely, but if it does happen, I wouldn't want that mod to instantly be unnecessarily incompatible with mods that don't actually have any incompatibility issues.

The easiest solution (in my opinion)? Allowing mods to depend on core, since that literally can't be technically turned off like base can. No new field in the info.json is required, it's using a system that already exists for this kind of thing, and modders wouldn't have to live in fear of a non-base mod anymore.
It also just feels better to depend on an engine version rather than the content version.

I support this, as just discussed on discord (https://discord.com/channels/1396775903 ... 0785350676) i have ran into it too a few times, ofc it is indeed highly unlikely someone does (manage to) disable base but it'd be nice to mark a mod to need a certain version of the game itself when it does not depend on prototypes or assets from the base mod at all, allowing core in the dependencies field would be a nice and clean solution for this.

The core mod doesn't have a version number to depend on.

Bilka wrote: Tue Aug 12, 2025 2:16 pm The core mod doesn't have a version number to depend on.

Any downside to just setting it (read: hardcoding) to the game's version that it is launched with instead of from an info.json?

The request in this case is to pretend core has a version number for the purposes of the dependency, that way mods could use the dependency system as it is now to control the allowed engine version, instead of needing a new info.json field along the lines of factorio_version, or changing factorio_version's behavior.

+1