Tannin42

Only ~90 of the game extensions are bundled, the other 300+ are community provided and those do only install when you explicitly install them. And then you only get extension download if the extension has seen a (released) update since the last full Vortex update and that probably only affects those 2 games you're seeing updated.

It's not just two specific extensions, all extensions that ship with Vortex auto-update. A remove button wouldn't do you much good because, again: These extensions ship with the application, the next time Vortex itself gets updated, they would be back again because they are part of the bundle. Updating only the extensions for games you have installed also doesn't work because the extension is how Vortex knows whether the game is installed in the first place. Finally a bugged extension could be messing with the entire application even when you're not managing the extension and then you'd still want the update. It just doesn't make sense to work around all these potential use cases to save you an amount of download that is a fraction of a single ad being served on the website. In retrospect I do agree that we did make a mistake: These downloads just shouldn't show up. No notification, no entry in the download list, just update in the background and never inform the user it happened.

There is a bit of a misunderstanding of how this works. Windows sees the links as using up space but it doesn't affect the amount of free disk space it sees on disk or how much you can add to your disk. Maybe an example: Say you have a 512GB disk. You have 400GB of files and then you create hard links for all of them. a) This works no problem b) Your windows explorer will say you have 800GB of files on your 512GB disk with 112GB still available c) you can still add 112GB worth of files to your disk What gets "misrepresented" is only used space, not how much is left. The conclusion is: If your disk is full then it's full of actual files, the hard links don't actually matter.

"Staging" is a pool of mods you have installed and configured, that is shared as has been explained. A profile is really just a list of those mods to activate together. Vortex does support installing the same mod multiple times as "variants" which you can then toggle with the version field (it turns into a drop-down if you have multiple versions or variants of the same mod) so if you have two profiles, say one for making pretty screenshots or videos with all the highest texture resolutions and one for playing at high framerate, you can install each mod in a "high quality" and a "low quality" variant and assign to profiles accordingly. Having multiple staging folders was something we considered during development but it would be challenging to do nicely in the UI: you'd still want the choice to install mods as "shared" (let's say something like skse or bugfix mods) so you'd always have to make an additional choice any time you install a mod. Then you'd need an option to move mods between staging folders (e.g. if you want to redo a profile but not reinstall everything) or you make a copy of a profile and want to share mods between _those_. So maybe what you'd really want is an arbitrary set of staging folders and each profile could then "subscribe" to any number of staging folders such that the mod list only shows mods from those. That way you can be as granualar as you want. But that still leaves the added complexity of having to choose which staging folder to install a new mod to.

The point is that almost all of the time the order of plugins either doesn't matter at all or there is an objectively correct order between two plugins (one order works, one order breaks stuff). The Vortex approach forces the order (masterlist) when there is an objectively correct case and leaves all others unset so you can assign them yourself if you want. But even in a very large load order you probably wont have more than a handful of pairings where the order matters and is up to taste. That is entirely feasible. Even though admittedly the UI for assigning rules is - not great - if you're using it a lot you're almost certainly doing it wrong by controlling load order that has no effect on the game.

Not quite: if you run your mod manager with an admin account, the files you install with it may be accessible only with admin permissions (depending on other windows settings). Thus you will end up forced to run the game and all other modding tools as admin as well so it's kind of like a "security hole cascade". Having said that: This detection is not 100% reliable. There are windows settings that you (or whoever set up your system) can make that give your regular account some permissions that it wouldn't usually have and that misleads Vortex into think you're running as a full blown admin. In that case it's reasonably safe to ignore this message because you're not running anything with more permission than you would have done otherwise.

https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/634 Last updated is a bit over two weeks ago so I wouldn't assume this is abandoned. Afaict the main supporter for this extension is still insomnius so one of the Vortex devs, they probaby just wanted a quicker way to push updates to the extension instead of updating the entire application.

Not sure how you mean, a conflict means that two mods contain the same file name (and path) but they may have different content. Deploy order really matters for any loose files, might be it just decides which texture you actually get in game but technically it could also be scripts that could break the game or quests if loaded in the wrong order. Depending on the game file conflicts will be more or less common, with Skyrim SE more mods use BSAs so file conflicts are less common. It also depends on the kind of mod, if two mods each add new items to be crafted they will likely not conflict (or only conflict on some readme file or something) but if it's replacing game content (like SMIM) the order is important, only one mod can replace a specific asset.

Yes. Deploy order may affect which textures or meshes or even scripts get loaded effectively but the more mods use BSAs the fewer deploy conflicts you will get. Technically it’s the same for the plugin order: plugins may or may not conflict on the records they contain (or the assets in the associated BSA) and if there is no conflict, Plugin Order doesn’t matter either. Only difference is that plugin conflicts aren’t easy to detect/visualize.

Yes, a while back. The last 7z update was over a year ago (based on github history). This vulnerability has been published last week. So yes, I agree with the OP, Vortex is probably affected by this.

To rephrase what has been said above: .esm files are masters .esl files are (light) masters However, a .esp file can be any combination of master/not master, light/not light. So while you can be sure that a .esm or .esl file is a master, for a .esp file you need to consult the flags column inside Vortex.

Just for the record: I'm the creator of the extension, it's open-source, Nexus Mods has my number. At no point did anyone reach out to me to figure out what the problem is or if it could be fixed before deleting it. I learned about the removal from this very thread.

https://forums.funcom.com/t/mods-on-microsoft-store-pc-and-how-to-install-them/168411 Obviously this does not detail how to do it in Vortex, I suspect a programmer would have to add support for the game pass variant of the game. But tbh, Conan Exiles has such great modding support, doing it manually is barely more effort than using a mod manager. Also, the game is a bit old and often on sale, maybe you could just try to get it on steam for cheap. I think the steam workshop actually has a bunch of mods for this game you might not get on Nexus Mods.

"manually set location" is not profile specific though, once you change the game location, all profiles will deploy to that location. I think what the others have suggested is to use the "--user-data" command-line switch to have to completely separate Vortex "instances" (with distinct sets of mods, downloads, profiles, settings, ...). Then you can have one instance targeting the gog install of the game and the other for the steam install.