Do mods affect ALL of your savegames??

[RM1985]

I would like to try out some mods for the first time after nearly 600 hours in vanilla, BUT my question is, will playing a new game with mods affect other saves as well? So are the mods always "ON" for all games or can I turn them off when playing another game, trying to gain that last achievement?

Another thing: Can you just download certain buildings like a bakery or dairy from those big mod packs? I just want to add some buildings that are kinda missing IMO, not ecerything that is out there, cause that is just too much stuff to handle, I once checked out Megamod.

[Vrayna]

When you add mods and enable them from the main menu, they'll only apply to towns you create after that while the mods are active. If you disable them you can play your vanilla towns without trouble again, or create new unmodded towns for achievements.

Note that after making any change to your modlist from the main menu, after the game auto-reloads when you confirm, you should take the time to entirely close Banished and restart before creating your new town. It's the only way to force the game to handle the mod changes correctly, and it will prevent the usual "crashing when trying to quit my town" issue that happens if you don't exit-restart before creating a town.

There are small mods with individual buildings. There are some on the workwhop, and some on BanishedInfo.com or WorldOfBanished.com . Try to pick only mods published on the workshop after mid 2017 (or December 2016 if outside the workshop) to avoid old mods made with the previous version of the modkit, for the previous version of the game.

It's not possible to "unpack" just specific things from big mods, but something like Colonial Charter has a few "smaller" sections that were made into independent mods for those who don't want to use everything (the whole dock set is available as a mod independent from CC for example). Those can be found at BlackLiquidSoftware.com (and some other little bits of CC things are at WorldOfBanished.com )

MegaMod is huge, it's a "love it or panic at the sight of it" deal. I personally find it overwhelming and tend to stick to "smaller" mods like CC or TheNorth, or hand-picked things from Kid's long list of mods (at WorldOfBanished).


Edit:
Load order: mods at the top of the list overwrite things under them, and "big mods" can usually be trusted to have reliable/consistent file naming.
Rule of thumb for load order:
- Tuning mods altering the big mod
- Big mod
- Independent stand-alone mods

[RM1985]

Thx for the answers.
Can I also use an existing vanilla game to "try out" some mods without saving the game or would the save then still getting "corrupted" ?

[Vrayna]

Yes and no.
You can enable mods in an existing town (and as long as you save on a different save slot after that you should still have a safe vanilla town to come back to), BUT anything that's already built or present on the map won't be affected by the mod.

So if you add a mod that changes how the Trade Post behaves, how much stuff you can put in barns, or one that changes the Gatherer's radius for example, you'll have to destroy and rebuild those buildings, otherwise you won't see any change.

If you add a mod that changes production chains and adds exotic items, you'll have to think about rebuilding all the production places that use those, but also probably the barns and trade posts so their inventories can accept the new items in case they use non-vanilla flags.

Now if you want to add something that just adds more houses or buildings with different looks, but doesn't touch how things work, no problem.


If you want to try out a mod "for free", pick up the Debug Tool mod (the most recent one, the old one on the workshop no longer works correctly), it will help you "free build" things to see how they look. I think you can place down buildings at no cost with the mod, you just need the builders to do the work.

[RM1985]

Thx again :)

So I loaded my latest save, where I still need to go to do the 200 years achievement, mods enabled and then saved it on a new slot.
That means I can still use that older save to continue my 200 year journey and get the achievement, right?
I just have to be sure, since I have still 72 years to go and would be bummed if I got to 200 years without getting the achievement.

[Vrayna]

Yup, it will work, just remember to disable the mods cleanly from the main menu and restart Banished before you reopen that vanilla save, to avoid problems.


(In theory, depending on the mods you picked, you could also reach the 200 years in your modded town, destroy any modded building then, disable the mods and get the achievements that way. Disabling mods mid-game is always tricky though, there's often one small thing you forgot to destroy that will mess things up :P )