Mods - subscriptions. How to use?

[taltybios]

I've never used mods before.
Are mod downloads and subscriptions paid for or can I use them for free?
Are they compatible with each other?
Can I uninstall them?
What does the subscription involve?
Which mods do you recommend?

[City Builder]

The ones in the workshop here on steam are free.
Not all mods are compatible with each other.
If you uninstall them and a save game was using it, it could break that save game but yes, overall you can uninstall them by unsubscribing to them in the workshop
The subscription involves you clicking a button and Steam downloads that mod to your computer, you'll still have to turn it on in the mods screen inside the game

I'd say play the vanilla game first to get a thorough idea of how it works, after that I like colonial charter mod, and after that you need to go off Steam to get BlackLiquids "Mega Mod" that has many mods inside of it (many is an understatement). It's a huge file that had to be split into 3 parts due to it's size but you have to get it from their website, it's not on steam.

[rkelly17]

There are numerous free to use mods on World of Banished and all Colonial Charter and Megamod files are on Black Liquid's website. The one difference in using those is you have to download and install them yourself. What you download are normally .zip or .rar compressed files, so you will need 7-Zip or some similar file compression utility. Download the file and unzip it. That will give you a .pkm file which is the actual mod. Your downloaded mod will need to be moved to the folder (normally) .. \Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Banished\WinData. What the original Banished install puts in this folder are four files: data0.pkg. data1.pkg, patch0.pkg, and patch1.pkg. Once you moved your mod into this folder Banished will recognize the mod the next time you start the program. Before starting a new game you will need to activate the mod in the mod screen. If you use large mods (Such as Colonial Charter or Megamod) or a large number of mods Banished will take longer to load--perhaps much longer--so be ready for that. Activating mods is on a game-by-game basis, so you need to activate mods every time you start a new game. While it is possible to add mods to a preexisting save game or update the mods in the game, that can lead to trouble with crashing games, so I don't do it (one reason I don't use the workshop which likes to update automatically). I recommend that, once you start using mods, play a game until you feel it is complete, then update all your mods and add new ones, then start a new game. The mod screen will tell you about potential conflicts, but not all conflicts are game breaking. Some are, so be careful, but some are just an indication that both mods modify the same file. I don't remember for positive, but I think that the game uses the version of the file that loads first (I could be wrong about this, so check), so the load order of your mods is important and can be controlled in the mod screen. Also, if you've been playing vanilla for awhile, mods like Colonial Charter make changes in the resources necessary to produce certain products. For example, in vanilla you gather or mine iron directly, but in Colonial Charter you gather or mine iron ore and you have to forge it into iron. That really changes the early game.