mods on official servers Why not ?

[Darren Malin]

as he title say why can we not have mods on official servers ? we are paying for them after it is not a freebie 

[CastIronFabric]

 

Quote

we are paying for them after it is not a freebie 

 

what? paying for mods? after what is not a freebie?

Edited September 7, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Echo Weaver]

I'm pretty sure we're talking about paying for the server. 

I'm a bit surprised that Tyron's official service doesn't support mods, if I have that correct. So much work has gone into supporting modding. Mods on a commercial server are a risk, but we already have a system where mods are already modded in a central database supported by Anego. It's possible to side-load mods, but that seems like it would be straightforward to block without refusing all mods.

I don't know what the thought process is there. I agree that it's weird.

[CastIronFabric]

57 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I'm pretty sure we're talking about paying for the server. 

I'm a bit surprised that Tyron's official service doesn't support mods, if I have that correct. So much work has gone into supporting modding. Mods on a commercial server are a risk, but we already have a system where mods are already modded in a central database supported by Anego. It's possible to side-load mods, but that seems like it would be straightforward to block without refusing all mods.

I don't know what the thought process is there. I agree that it's weird.

There are multiple reasons why companies do not have an official server with mods of which they have no control over but the easiest reason to understand is that people will confuse the mod features with core game features no matter how many words in the description of the features the mod makers puts.

Also, if the mods are not up to date on the official server that will cause even more confusion. This also means each update has to be tested a lot because the changes being made to the mods are from people not offically on the team and if for any reason they do not work, the VS team WILL be blamed for it.

 

Edited September 7, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Thorfinn]

Extending a bit on @CastIronFabric, it also gives the team immediate and direct access to crash logs. Particularly in EA, it's critical to get that right away, and not have to fiddle around with disabling mods until they find the offender.

[LadyWYT]

Tagging on to what @CastIronFabric and @Thorfinn said, I'd wager it's also for security reasons. While I'm not sure that it's been a problem with the VS modding community, there have been scandals in other games in which certain mod authors had added malicious code to their mods(some of them popular mods, at that). By excluding mods from the official servers, that does keep the servers more basic, but it also means that users won't need to worry about malicious code.

[Thorfinn]

13 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

By excluding mods from the official servers, that does keep the servers more basic, but it also means that users won't need to worry about malicious code.

It would not surprise me if .dll mods get discontinued, and all such get compiled at runtime, so more eyes can look to see if there are things embedded that should not be. Slows down load time, to be sure, and also put more strain on the server, since you can't really offload that onto the client, at least easily, but only for those using mods.

[Echo Weaver]

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It would not surprise me if .dll mods get discontinued, and all such get compiled at runtime, so more eyes can look to see if there are things embedded that should not be. Slows down load time, to be sure, and also put more strain on the server, since you can't really offload that onto the client, at least easily, but only for those using mods.

This seems to go in the face of the amount of work that was put into building a mods ecosytem, including a supported API.

I'm not denying that mods cause extra risk. I'm pointing out that the game embraces that risk and does its best to mitigate it already. With that ethos in place, it surprises me that Anego is not involved in modded server hosting.

[Darren Malin]

sure the company can control what mod is listed on the official mod list. listing and allowing only approved mods. 

[Thorfinn]

54 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

This seems to go in the face of the amount of work that was put into building a mods ecosytem, including a supported API.

Not at all. It's just that instead of the mod being compiled dlls, where you will have to count it being in the virus scan database, or fail a heuristics, mods would be simply source code, and the game itself would compile them. It's just that like all other open source projects, there are lots of people who can read code who cannot make sense of a decompiled output.

24 minutes ago, Darren Malin said:

sure the company can control what mod is listed on the official mod list. listing and allowing only approved mods. 

Do you have any idea how much anti-virus companies spend and how many people they dedicate to doing basically the same thing?

Edited September 7, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

55 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

With that ethos in place, it surprises me that Anego is not involved in modded server hosting.

The only way I would do it is to run it from within a virtual machine. In fact, that's what I do even having reviewed or written most of the mods I use. But, again, how many full-time people do you want to pay to do that? Seems we recently had a big kerfuffle about people concerned that having a few people working on Adventure Mode was pulling people away from the core mission.

[Echo Weaver]

53 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

The only way I would do it is to run it from within a virtual machine. In fact, that's what I do even having reviewed or written most of the mods I use. But, again, how many full-time people do you want to pay to do that? Seems we recently had a big kerfuffle about people concerned that having a few people working on Adventure Mode was pulling people away from the core mission.

A VM seems like how you'd do it. We ran a modded Minecraft server for friends for a couple of years. Dockerizing MC or VS is -- well, not simple, but done frequently and well understood.

There are professional servers that host modded games. I'm sure there a best practices for keeping your infrastructure safe.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, Darren Malin said:

sure the company can control what mod is listed on the official mod list. listing and allowing only approved mods. 

Yeah, it wouldn't even have to accept all mods in the ModDB, though they clearly DO keep an eye on the listings there and hold them to standards. But a safer alternative would be to offer a set of mods from a fixed list that the admins have confidence in.

[CastIronFabric]

15 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

This seems to go in the face of the amount of work that was put into building a mods ecosytem, including a supported API.

I'm not denying that mods cause extra risk. I'm pointing out that the game embraces that risk and does its best to mitigate it already. With that ethos in place, it surprises me that Anego is not involved in modded server hosting.

 

lets put it this way.

Why not just have all the mods created for the game already installed in the game at purchase of the game.

Does that sound like a good idea? no?

perhaps for the same reason they do not want to have a modded 'official server' nevermind the question of WHICH mods should be installed and WHICH mods should not.

Should they install Expanded Foods (which by the way still does not work for the new version of this game) AND Art of Cooking? 

 

Edited September 8, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Diff]

To play the devil's advocate for a moment, as long as security bounds are in place, put responsibility on the player for mod management just like singleplayer or self/3rd-party hosting. That is an approach that works for very many dedicated hosts. I'm not sure it works as well for the official hosting.

I think that modding (at least when done like that) interferes with the current plug-and-play, set-and-forget nature that the official hosting currently provides. It would likely send ticket counts through the roof, swamp at least one employee with just closing invalid tickets, tick off a lot of foolish customers who shot themselves in the foot (there's already a continuous stream of angry people who can't read descriptions of their purchases), and dilute the actually valid issues that might lurk in their actual hosting, all compounded with the fact that you can't just turn off all mods to test and still get an acceptably playable world in a lot of instances. Allowing modding opens up many cans of worms that aren't easily solved, and that's before we look at the shelf of wormcans labeled "whitelisting."

Edited September 8, 2025 by Diff
Whitelisting exists

[Toroic]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

 

lets put it this way.

Why not just have all the mods created for the game already installed in the game at purchase of the game.

Does that sound like a good idea? no?

perhaps for the same reason they do not want to have a modded 'official server' nevermind the question of WHICH mods should be installed and WHICH mods should not.

Should they install Expanded Foods (which by the way still does not work for the new version of this game) AND Art of Cooking? 

 

Not only have you missed the original (if somewhat unclearly worded) question, you also put together a terrible argument against it.

Obviously no one wants to have 10 GB of mods they don't use installed, and no one is discussing that strawman taken to absurdity.

VS "official" server hosting though appears to be a very simple way for Anego Studios to self-host servers for players as a paid service that generates them some additional reoccurring revenue.  Not supporting mods makes this much less complex, and only supporting servers in central Europe makes me suspect they probably own their own server hardware.

The wiki has a list of vendors whose primary business model is hosting servers, and those do allow modding.  It absolutely can be done (and at comparable prices to what VS is offering) but really works better at an enterprise level not when self-hosting for one game.

In practice, if you're looking to host a modded VS server you should be looking to 3rd party vendors with the understanding that a little technical knowledge will be required for setup and administration.

If you have no technical knowledge and are unwilling to learn, then you can use VS "official" server hosting because it's intended to be as simple as possible.

[CastIronFabric]

22 minutes ago, Toroic said:

Not only have you missed the original (if somewhat unclearly worded) question, you also put together a terrible argument against it.

Obviously no one wants to have 10 GB of mods they don't use installed, and no one is discussing that strawman taken to absurdity.

VS "official" server hosting though appears to be a very simple way for Anego Studios to self-host servers for players as a paid service that generates them some additional reoccurring revenue.  Not supporting mods makes this much less complex, and only supporting servers in central Europe makes me suspect they probably own their own server hardware.

The wiki has a list of vendors whose primary business model is hosting servers, and those do allow modding.  It absolutely can be done (and at comparable prices to what VS is offering) but really works better at an enterprise level not when self-hosting for one game.

In practice, if you're looking to host a modded VS server you should be looking to 3rd party vendors with the understanding that a little technical knowledge will be required for setup and administration.

If you have no technical knowledge and are unwilling to learn, then you can use VS "official" server hosting because it's intended to be as simple as possible.

your missing the point.

There are many reasons to not do this and many of those reasons have been listed by me and other.

this ONE specific reason I am illuminating is this:

how do they decide WHICH mods to be on the 'official server' and what company resources should be used to curate that process?

Moreover, the same reasons one would give as to why the purchase of the game should not include some curated mods would be by and large the same reason why one would not want to do it on an 'official game server' which was illustrated in hopes of jogging creative thinking

 

Edited September 8, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Toroic]

4 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

your missing the point.

There are many reasons to not do this and many of those reasons have been listed by me and other.

this ONE specific reason I am illuminating is this:

how do they decide WHICH mods to be on the 'official server' and what company resources should be used to curate that process?

 

No, I'm not missing the point.

No one other than you appears confused about the fact that we're talking about a player paying for Anego to host a server, at which point the mod selection would be decided by the person paying for the server.

This is exactly how it works if you went through any of the dozen companies whose entire business model is providing server hosting.

At no point was anyone talking about free public servers provided by Anego.

I understand that the title of this thread is poorly worded because there are games where the company hosts "official servers", but in the context of this discussion we are specifically talking about Anego hosting servers that a player is paying for.  The person paying for the server is who chooses the mod selection.

[CastIronFabric]

18 minutes ago, Toroic said:

No, I'm not missing the point.

No one other than you appears confused about the fact that we're talking about a player paying for Anego to host a server, at which point the mod selection would be decided by the person paying for the server.

This is exactly how it works if you went through any of the dozen companies whose entire business model is providing server hosting.

At no point was anyone talking about free public servers provided by Anego.

I understand that the title of this thread is poorly worded because there are games where the company hosts "official servers", but in the context of this discussion we are specifically talking about Anego hosting servers that a player is paying for.  The person paying for the server is who chooses the mod selection.

ok so to be clear we are all not  talking about 'official hosted servers' so all the reasons to not do this listed by me and other people do not apply because we were unclear what was being discussed.

correct?

Ok, so we all know any of us can host a server by a 3rd party and put whatever mods we want on said server... correct?

Why would Anego want to effectively get into the business of server hosting when there are already lots of server hosting companies that specialize in such services and the services provided to the customer would be effectively identical to just paying GPortal, HostHavoc, BisectHosting, Pingperfect, Shockbyte, Nodecraft, CreeperHost, CitadelHosting, Akliz, or Godlike.host

additionally, I personally am not aware of any game studio that does what you are suggesting here. There likely is some but standard practice as long as I have been gaming is usually to do exactly what  Anego is doing which is to host an 'official server' that has the core game but NOT have in effect hosting services for players.

I have just learned that yes Anego does offer 'simple hosting services'. I was unaware, I would agree if that is what they are doing then sure allow mods to be installed on player servers, I see no issue with that.

Edited September 8, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[CastIronFabric]

52 minutes ago, Diff said:

To play the devil's advocate for a moment, as long as security bounds are in place, put responsibility on the player for mod management just like singleplayer or self/3rd-party hosting. That is an approach that works for very many dedicated hosts. I'm not sure it works as well for the official hosting.

I think that modding (at least when done like that) interferes with the current plug-and-play, set-and-forget nature that the official hosting currently provides. It would likely send ticket counts through the roof, swamp at least one employee with just closing invalid tickets, tick off a lot of foolish customers who shot themselves in the foot (there's already a continuous stream of angry people who can't read descriptions of their purchases), and dilute the actually valid issues that might lurk in their actual hosting, all compounded with the fact that you can't just turn off all mods to test and still get an acceptably playable world in a lot of instances. Allowing modding opens up many cans of worms that aren't easily solved, and that's before we look at the shelf of wormcans labeled "whitelisting."

to be honest I am unclear as to what specifically what we are talking about

A.  Anego having 'offical servers' that they support that have mods

B.  Anego having a side server hosting service in which players can host a mod and put mods they want on it just like BisectHosting
 

Regarding legal liability if I was a weekend modder I would not put my mod on the offical server because I can not afford $200 an hour on legal fees should I screw up

Edited September 8, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Rhyagelle]

I don't know why mod support isn't allowed on the official server hosting service, but my guess is it has something to do with cost. If you plan on using mods and until it is supported, I would just suggest using BisectHosting. Super cheap and very, very, very good. 

[CastIronFabric]

3 minutes ago, Rhyagelle said:

I don't know why mod support isn't allowed on the official server hosting service, but my guess is it has something to do with cost. If you plan on using mods and until it is supported, I would just suggest using BisectHosting. Super cheap and very, very, very good. 

I would imagine its because they do not want people assuming that Anego is responsible for servers not working if a bad mod is installed. That said, that is basically what Biscet would have to deal with for all the games it hosts as well.

I see no problem with the idea of allowing players to have mods on their own servers hosted by Anego

[Echo Weaver]

We're talking about the hosting service run by Anego, which is a for-pay service. There is also an official server, which is vanilla and (I assume, since I haven't logged on) free, but we're not talking about that. The title of the thread is ambiguous, but the OP did specify that they're talking about for-pay servers.

[CastIronFabric]

5 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

We're talking about the hosting service run by Anego, which is a for-pay service. There is also an official server, which is vanilla and (I assume, since I haven't logged on) free, but we're not talking about that. The title of the thread is ambiguous, but the OP did specify that they're talking about for-pay servers.

got it. 

I have no issue with the suggestion. I am not sure what the advantage is for a player over just using Biscet or something

 

[Diff]

18 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

to be honest I am unclear as to what specifically what we are talking about

A.  Anego having 'offical servers' that they support that have mods

B.  Anego having a side server hosting service in which players can host a mod and put mods they want on it just like BisectHosting
 

Regarding legal liability if I was a weekend modder I would not put my mod on the offical server because I can not afford $200 an hour on legal fees should I screw up

B. Anego provides server hosting in the store that integrates directly into the launcher (check out the listing even if you're not interested, it's nifty), but it doesn't allow customers to add mods to their purchased servers. It's set-and-forget, requiring no technical knowledge whatsoever, which is the value add over places like Bisect.

There are no legal liability issues for modders in this scenario, just headaches for Anego.

Edited September 8, 2025 by Diff
+1 sentence after getting sniped