Mod load order

[ManaWei]

I play around with a lot of mod at times.. and one thing got my attention..

The mod load order.. could really use a feature like that.. just thought it was worth mentioning..

[Thorfinn]

There is such a thing. Dependencies. It doesn't seem well fleshed out yet, as "soft" dependencies throw a crapton of warning messages on startup,

But if you want your mod to load last, give it a dependency on some mod you use that has a dependency on another mod. Something like Expanded Foods. Then name your mod something like "ZZZerrificFunMod" Recurse the chain as long as you need to make sure everything else loads first.

Edited March 27, 2025 by Thorfinn

[IAmMoss]

On 3/27/2025 at 11:22 AM, Thorfinn said:

There is such a thing. Dependencies. It doesn't seem well fleshed out yet, as "soft" dependencies throw a crapton of warning messages on startup,

But if you want your mod to load last, give it a dependency on some mod you use that has a dependency on another mod. Something like Expanded Foods. Then name your mod something like "ZZZerrificFunMod" Recurse the chain as long as you need to make sure everything else loads first.

@ThorfinnCould you help me with this scenario. I have butchering and r.meat installed. both change the drops for animals when vanilla harvesting, in opposite directions. r.meat also changes what you get out of the butchering table. it seems whatever patch to the vanilla drops r.meat applies is what takes effect, which makes butchering practically irrelevant. how would i theoretically get butchering's patches to take effect on the vanilla item drops over r.meat? would making butchering dependent on r.meat make it override r.meats patches?

Edited January 6 by IAmMoss
forgot to tag person im responding to

[Dilan Rona]

an ideal solution would be to traverse the mods first, and build the dependancy map, before the actual loading of the mods. that way the game builds up the list of mods to load, scans for dependancies, reorders them according to what needs to be loaded first before anything else, and then proceeds to do the loading of the mods in the proper order.

[Thorfinn]

I think in this case I'd brute force it, @IAmMoss. Just open up the butchering mod and edit its dependencies to include r.meat, so it forces that to load first. Without looking at the dependencies in each of those, I'm not sure how you could force butchering to be a later load order using your own mods. There may be a more elegant solution, but going in blind, I don't know.

 

[Thorfinn]

On 1/7/2026 at 11:44 AM, Dilan Rona said:

an ideal solution would be to traverse the mods first, and build the dependancy map, before the actual loading of the mods. that way the game builds up the list of mods to load, scans for dependancies, reorders them according to what needs to be loaded first before anything else, and then proceeds to do the loading of the mods in the proper order.

Pretty sure that's how it works now. It goes through all mods and loads all the ones with no dependencies first. Then it goes through the list of unloaded mods to see if any of those dependencies are now met, and loads that tranche. Repeat until everything is loaded.

[Averixus]

Throwing in my vote for this feature as well. Soft dependencies would be great.