Load Order...again. Other games.

[Tannin42]

Sorry, I just skimmed the messages, I may have missed things but I'm not sure this has been fully explained.

 

There are two orders:

- The mod order (aka deployment order) you set on the mods screen decides file overrides, meaning that if two mods contain the same file (or to be precise: a file at the same path) you have to pick which gets actually placed in the game directory. That is the equivalent of overwriting (or not) existing files if you were to manually extract the mod archive into the game directory.

If a mod has no file conflicts, setting a mod order has no effect (for any game) apart from making deployment slower. If you have a file conflict, Vortex will tell you. If you don't have file conflicts, you should not set order rules on mods.

 

- The load order affects which order the game itself loads the mods. Whether you can affect the load order and what effect the load order has varies wildly between games. Vortex offers automatic ordering with LOOT for the bethesda games because for those games it's practically impossible to predict or see the effect of wrong load order across the entire game so that a bad load order may reveal itself only hours into the game when you've already screwed up all your savegames. This is why the community treats it like some sort of black magic when really it's actually fairly simple mechanically.

For most other games, _if_ the game allows setting the load order, Vortex has manual drag&drop based load ordering with a bit of game-specific explanation.

 

For Valheim specifically (I haven't developed the game support so this may be bad information) I'm not aware of any cases where the load order between mods actually matters - either mods are compatible no matter how they are ordered or they aren't compatible at all.

For Load Order to be useful you need cases where two mods work loaded in one order but not the other and what many people don't seem to realize: This is only the case in a tiny fraction of mod combinations. Across all games, the common case is that the order doesn't matter at all.

[DoctorKaizeld]

To tack onto Tannin's comment. Games like Valheim that are early access and frequently updating are going to have more mods that simply don't work anymore.

[Ethreon]

All Valheim mods will load their requirements as needed regardless of load order as that's not really a concept for this game.

[Guest deleted34304850]

i tried to tell him that, he then denied that was his issue even though the title of this thread, and his posts contradicted him.

still, his cv was interesting.

[Tannin42]

All Valheim mods will load their requirements as needed regardless of load order as that's not really a concept for this game.

 

Well, the OP is right on one thing: Mods have to be loaded in _some_ order (fallback would be alphabetically or whatever order the operating system/file system returns files in) and there is always a possibility it has an effect.

 

Unity mods afaik work by adding custom code that gets injected into existing functions, either as a preamble or postamble.

If you have a mod that wants to affect what items a monster drops you might have an existing function "OnMonsterDied"

and then mods could add their own code to be run before or after that function to change drop probabilities or to explicitly spawn items.

 

Depending on the order the mods got loaded in, this could then look like this:

"Mod A PreOMD hook" -> "Mod B PreOMD hook" -> OnMonsterDied (original) -> "Mod A PostOMD hook" -> "Mod B PostOMD hook"

or

"Mod B PreOMD hook" -> "Mod A PreOMD hook" -> OnMonsterDied (original) -> "Mod B PostOMD hook" -> "Mod A PostOMD hook"

 

It's conceivable that, depending on how these mods are implemented, the end result may be different because the one mod might be designed to integrate with other mods while the other just doesn't care and reverts whatever the first mod did.

 

I'm therefore not ready to rule out that Valheim may eventually need load order management, whether the game / mod loader explicitly supports it or not (we have plenty of games where we have to rename the mods "aaa - modname", "aab - modname", ... to enforce a certain alphabetical order) but I'm against implementing it just because the hypothetical chance it may eventually be required exists.

Heck, for all I know the devs will add official modding support and then we basically have to start over anyway.