Factorio Forums

1. What did I do?

• Started the game
• Went to Mod -> Updates from the main menu.
• Updated the Pyanondons Alternative Energy (pyalternativeenergy) mod.

FWIW, the mod was not enabled in the current game settings, just installed.

2. What happened?

The mod was downloaded/updated. Recommended dependencies were installed automatically. These include the two following mods relevant to the rest of the bug report:

• cargo-bays-and-unloaders
• enable-all-feature-flags

I returned to the Manage tab intending to uninstall these 2 mods, since I don't have the DLC. However both mods:

• were not listed in the Manage tab,
• could not be disabled or uninstalled in any apparent way.

So I restarted the game which of course lead to initialisation failure. First, prompting to disable Cargo Bays, then on the second restart, to disable All Feature Flags, then on the third restart finally working again.

At that point, and only at that point, it was possible to uninstall the two forbidden mods manually from the Mods Manage tab.

3. What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

Either one of:

• Ideally, recommended dependencies that require the DLC should be ignored by the installer/updater if the DLC is not available.
• Alternatively, all mods should be listed in the Manage tab after they are installed, regardless of them being forbidden due to feature flag mismatches.

4. Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

The same problem can be produced systematically by uninstalling PyAE and then installing it back again. This is of course only reproducible on an installation without the DLC.

I'm not sure there's any way for the game to handle this. Since the mod(s) in question do not require space-age explicitly the installer has no way to know they require the DLC executable to function.

Actually, I was wrong. It was pointed out to me that the mod portal API provides this information from parsing the mod info.json. So, this is now fixed for the next release.