Factorio Forums

Ugh, I've dipped my toe into trying to join a modded server and I can already see this process sucks immensely.

• You have to manually add mods to the game via downloading either individual mods, or from a zipfile.
• Although you can have multiple versions of the same mod in the game directory, it only picks the newest version and won't allow joining to a server with the older mod version that you do have installed.
• If you have more mods installed than the server has, you can't connect.
• You cannot join any vanilla servers if mods are present.

This usability is terrible. The specific set of mods you have installed effectively restricts you to accessing potentially only one server which actually manages to match your specific set of mods and versions.

This program desperately needs a modpack manager that takes care of all these details automatically at pre-launch time, like Minecraft Feed The Beast / Curse / Twitch launcher, Minecraft AT Launcher, or Minecraft Technic Launcher.

And note of course that Mojang does not create any such launchers, so the Factorio staff do not need to be involved with such a project with this either, as all settings and directory locations are twiddled before the game proper even launches.

Is this seriously not a thing? certainly there's enough of us if we pool our resources we could make one...

SlackerCast wrote:Is this seriously not a thing? certainly there's enough of us if we pool our resources we could make one...

There were some but the seem abondoned...

viewforum.php?f=137

This is on the todo list for 0.16; I hope it's an early test feature

A lot of them went down/stopped when the game officially supported mod handling in-game. The only thing thats worth an external mod manager now is being able to launch a set of mods with factorio once.

OBAMA MCLAMA wrote:A lot of them went down/stopped when the game officially supported mod handling in-game. The only thing thats worth an external mod manager now is being able to launch a set of mods with Factorio once.

The 0.15 GUI is great for setting up your SP game, you can download the latest version of mods, enable/disable, set configs without editing files, etc.

But its still generally a pain in my experience of running servers. People need to go and find all the mods one at a time and make sure they get the right versions (because a server running a week or two may be behind for some mods). Then they need to make sure they have all the right ones enabled. Then make sure they have the right mod settings (or worse, edit any needed config.lua). And have the right Factorio experimental version on top of that. And the number of people that make a mistake and either cant see the server or get a "mismatch" error or such.

So it is yet to be seen if 0.16 will solve all those issues.

Its worth noting, that all such features I believe are possible today. A tool can easily fetch mods off the mod portal, and I believe it can also switch Factorio to the right version, and launch the game to direct connect the server. With a little help on the server side (either another tool, or mostly for organised dedicated server hosting setups) it could also fetch the config files. But... the question is if there is enough demand from the players wanting to play on modded servers? How many even want to install such a tool? A lot of the previous ones got abandoned due to lack of interest, and the considerable effort needed of the developers part to write and maintain it.