Why is ETS 2 so MOD unfriendly?

[TopShotta]

The title said it all - why is there no clean solution for all the mods available?

With every update some are bot working anymore, some are, one has to delete mods, redo sessions and so on and on. I love the game but if you are for example tuning your new truck and then the game crashes because of XYZ reason (could be everything but definately because of one or more mods) why is there no efficient way to implement mods so they are working, especially if they did in a prior version.

This is sooooo frustrating starting the game over and over and over again to check what causes the crashes and then in the end its a mod you would like to have but need to remove eventhough it sais compatible.

Even the whole mod order logic is beyond my imagination of logic. I've never seen a game with a order. Why can't we just select the mods we want and they work? The way it is right now (and since day 1) is only frustrating and needs to be updated in a way it works flawlessly. Without mods its not even half the fun.

[MirkoC407]

Because it is developing. Every game I play will make certain mods not work after the rules their topic is about were changed to actually improve the game. It is in fact arising from the fact that ETS2 is actually very mod friendly that you notice it. Because you can mod anything from trucks you driver through the AI vehicles around you, the road network, the weather, the freight market, the economy, the fuel prices, the companies served, etc. You name it, someone made a mod for it.
If ETS2 was mod unfriendly and would only allow new textures on trucks, you could still work with very old mods. I use one for 1.36 and I'm sure older ones would also work. But then the complaint would be why the game is so mod unfriendly that nearly nothing can be modded at all.

[BJWyler]

I laughed out loud reading the title. ETS2 and ATS are two of the most mod friendly games in existence. It's a fact of life that certain games will break certain mods whenever the game is updated because of the nature of the game. At the end of the day it is up to the mod authors to update their mods to keep them compatible.

[Dark & Realistic™ Nessie]

"Why is ETS2 so mod unfriendly?"
* Rockstar joins the conversation *

[garyh2462]

Not Mod friendly? I have many mods, all updated by the authors. There is the key to your missive. The author of the Mod, must update it, if it needs doing when the game is updated. Otherwise you will have problems. And if SCS wanted, they could remove all mods, and not allow the use of any. SCS sends out an alert, to the Modders to let them know, they need to update. What a great bunch of people. A sweeping statement, that is wrong. I must agree with my fellow truckers on this one. ETS and especially ATS are very Mod friendly.

[Prismix]

Originally posted by OtusPlay:

Even the whole mod order logic is beyond my imagination of logic. I've never seen a game with a order.

Don't play many moddable games then huh.......... i could name a dozen that have specific mod loading orders lol

[peppermint hollows]

Originally posted by Prismix:

Originally posted by OtusPlay:

Even the whole mod order logic is beyond my imagination of logic. I've never seen a game with a order.

Don't play many moddable games then huh.......... i could name a dozen that have specific mod loading orders lol

Exactly what I was going to say. Skyrim for example is probably one of the most well known games for modding, and definitely has one of the biggest modding communities out there, and it has a load order.

The load order exists for a reason. Some mods have dependencies on other mods and for that reason the mods the latter depends on need to be loaded first to avoid issues. The correct load order is also sometimes necessary to avoid issues or conflicts with two different mods if they both overwrite the same file.

[Krap-E-Player]

Perhaps one day game coding AIs will be able to crunch code changes against the available mods and identify issues on the fly and correct them all in the click of a mouse. Whatever, we're not there yet so while I hear your frustration OP, this game exposes so much of it inner workings to the modder that its actually mightily impressive how stable it runs.

[mr.tajny]

Originally posted by OtusPlay:

Even the whole mod order logic is beyond my imagination of logic. I've never seen a game with a order. Why can't we just select the mods we want and they work?

Your mods are not loaded all at once but one after another. If two or more of them affect same thing, then the load order affects the outcome becaose every newly loaded mod overwrites each already loaded mod - if they affect same thing in the same way.
Imagine this situation: you want a truck with red cabin and blue trailer. You find a mod that makes whole your truck red and another mod that makes your trailer blue. According to the order you choose to load these two mods the outcome could be
1) red both cabin and trailer (if you load the blue trailer mod first)
2) red cabin and blue trailer (if you load the blue trailer mod second)

[🐺Blue Wolf]

Suppose ETS2 is the only game you've ever played then.

Bethesda games (namely Skyrim and Fallout 4) for over a year were getting Creation Club updates that would end up breaking mods...not to mention those games also required a mod order, kinda like most other games you mod.

[Cathulhu]

To be frank, ETS2 and ATS are among the most mod friendly games i've ever played.

[Wolfgang]

If you have SUCH issues using mods then you are actually better off NOT using mods.

Mods are coming with responsibilities.

• You have to manually check after each update if your mods are still compatible with the game (no, the mod manager is NOT doing this for you).
  
• You have to look at the specific load order of the mods. For the bigger mods (e.g. ProMods) they even state it in their tutorial.
  
• You should always have at least 3 profiles. One with your mods, one to test new mods or find which mod is causing the issue (aka a profile you can delete and start new without issues) and a vanilla profile (no mods ever in it) to see if an issue is mod related or not and to play the new version after a big update.

If you don't want to have these responsibilities then you shouldn't use mods.

[Dark & Realistic™ Nessie]

Originally posted by Crap E. Pilot:

Perhaps one day game coding AIs will be able to crunch code changes against the available mods and identify issues on the fly and correct them all in the click of a mouse. Whatever, we're not there yet so while I hear your frustration OP, this game exposes so much of it inner workings to the modder that its actually mightily impressive how stable it runs.

From a logic point of view, it's much more simple for each of the modders to update their own mods than the game devs develop a feature that tries to identify errors on every single mod available. And it's also easier for players to identify what can go incompatible after an update: if game map was updated, then map mods are affected.

And game already kind of does that: just check the log and it identifies what's causing the issue. The problem if the game could "correct" issues on the fly, it may render a mod useless anyway. Imagine an economy mod: if game changes the code on how to calculate it, an outdated mod would simply be fully overwritten, and all values changes would go missing.

The problem people like OP have is that they wanna install 100+ mods at once, and half of them are made by modders who take ages to update them. Not to mention mods that render the profile reliant on it - the most common example are when players save a game while driving mod trucks or tunning parts, and they go incompatible.

I do use mods, but I've never had such issues. Most of the ones I use are made by modders who work pretty quickly, and that won't cause any problem if modder decides not to update them anymore.

[Krap-E-Player]

Fair enough. I'd don't know what I'm talking about anyway. I just wanted to empathise with the OP somehow and I failed at that.

[Dark & Realistic™ Nessie]

Originally posted by Crap E. Pilot:

Fair enough. I'd don't know what I'm talking about anyway. I just wanted to empathise with the OP somehow and I failed at that.

No problem at all. What you said could be implemented for real. What I enphasized is that, implementing "auto-fix" or keeping game as it is now, the result for some outdated mods would be the same anyway - mods would become unusable on both cases.

[magicISO Sweden]

its you that have to keep your mods up to date not SCS that gonna do that job for you. this is why i dont have that much mods my self.