Factorio Forums

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s_to_mods/

Last night i spent a large amount of time parsing through the pile of mods i had installed. I spent more time than i would've liked.

And thats when i came to the conclusion that this game could benefit from a mod playlist, so that i can have Krastorio, or Sea Block, or a combination of other mod sets that i can just toggle with the click of a button instead of having to meticulously comb through to switch between each time.

Go to the Load Game menu and click the save file.Click the Sync mods with save button in the top-right corner of the menu.The game will automatically match your mods to that save

vjbone wrote: Tue Aug 04, 2026 2:39 pm Go to the Load Game menu and click the save file.Click the Sync mods with save button in the top-right corner of the menu.The game will automatically match your mods to that save

Don't forget the part that actually solves OPs problem: uncheck "Load save after restart" in the sync mods dialog. That way it returns the main menu and you can continue managing mods before starting a new game. This is how we typically use "dummy" save files as saved modpacks.

Edit: and making a subfolder in the "saves" directory to put your modpack saves in. And the ability to customize the sync mods list, so you could for example check "keep enabled" on all the existing mods and it would just add the mods from the sync'd file to the existing ones.

vjbone wrote: Tue Aug 04, 2026 2:39 pm Go to the Load Game menu and click the save file.Click the Sync mods with save button in the top-right corner of the menu.The game will automatically match your mods to that save

as stated in the thread with the same suggestion you've made,

If you load a save and you aren't currently running some mods the save uses, those will be activated. But if you're running mods that the save isn't running... they will stay activated unless you explicitly press the "sync" button when you load it. So it's not quite the same thing.

I think this issue has been brought up a million times, and the existing workaround with dummy saves and gotchas that keeps being brought up as a justification for discarding the request is not a good solution.

Having modlists directy supported by the manager is a good proposal.

It'd be great if it allowed pinning versions of mods in it when necessary as well. As a continued example and argument - did you know that if you click "sync mods" button while holding control key, it will load the specific versions of mods (normally it loads the latest versions of mods present in the save)? Does that sound like a viable argument that you have the version sync feature available already and nothing needs to be improved?

That sync UI has other problems, for instance if syncing mods involves turning Space Age on or off it adds "load and fix" button positioned where "load and sync" would be, and "and fix" is rather vague and confusing, it's easy to push the wrong button in that process (most of the time you do NOT want to "fix" anything when you are working with 3rd party mods, especially overhauls).

That is to say that "load a save" is already a process complex enough that it's best to keep "load a save" UI dedicated to that problem and solving it well, and leave "modlists" problem & solution to a separate, dedicated UI that focusses on that issue instead.

Oh, and yet another issue with dummy saves - saves are sorted by date of change or alphabetically, just making sure that these "dummy saves" are even easy to locate in the list of saves is a whole separate quest of its own.

The list of save files is not built for that and it doesn't do it well.

+1

Visually, this could be solved like the Train Overview UI has several tabs for Trains, Train Groups, etc.

• One tab for the raw list of enabled/disabled mods just like we see currently.
• Another tab of "Mod Groups" or "Playlists" or "Modlists" would show enable/disable-able user-defined groups (a la Logistic Groups) with little sub-lists of mods themselves drag-n-droppable from a main "pool" of all mods currently installed/in the mods folder.
• Some other tab with something important i've missed...

While we are at it, Modpack Authoring would be a very handy feature. If we can already see the list of mod slug-names per save, whats stopping the UI from being able to export this as a copy-pastable line-seperated "dependencies" list?