Version Mismatch Fix

[Chip Patton]

So, I just got Stellaris and saw it had multi-player and immediately bought the game for a few friends including my son. After a few hours of game-play I realized that there were some things that seemed missing. Thankfully, the community stepped up and mods took care of that right away.

But as soon as my son started playing we got version mismatches. Obviously it's the mods. So I give him a mod list and sill, version mismatches. After a LOT of struggling and researching I found the answer, but not by research. After more than 4 hours of research no one made mention of what it took a lot of trial and error to figure out: Mods (a) must be exact and (b) in the exact same load order.

If one person in multiplayer uses a mod of any kind, even aesthetic mods, everyone must use them and they must be in identical load orders in which many mods are named to be in a "Z-A" load order.

Maybe this has all been said before, but I since I couldn't find it with search here or on Google, I figure I'd do any new players a service by dropping this here.

Some explaination to what I found is going on:

I found it confusing that the launcher showed the hash was something like 60bf and later, after the game loaded would change to something like e8a2. After a little investigation, I found the mods are "hot-patched" into the game upon load, not when you enable them in the launcher's mod manager as most games do. What this means is core game files are temporarily over-written in MEMORY (which is a good idea) rather than on the file system which causes the game's hash to change after it loads to the main menu.

After figuring this out, I knew it was something to do with the mods. And because mods overwrite their own files sometimes in the way the game hot-patches, load order becomes paramount. For instance if mod A has 3 files, 1 of which is a core patch, and mod b has 5 files, 2 of which are core patches - if A is loaded before b, then A's core patch is over-written by B. And in reverse. So, if you mods aren't exactly the same as the host and their load order, then your hash will always be different until you rectify that.

[Elitewrecker PT]

"After more than 4 hours of research no one made mention of what it took a lot of trial and error to figure out: Mods (a) must be exact and (b) in the exact same load order."

I doubt you wouldn't find that in 4 hours of research.

[LCdr. Mallard]

Yeh real helpful Elitewrecker

[Elitewrecker PT]

There's nothing else to say. OP made that whole post just to say that load order matters, which as I said, I don't see taking 4h of "research" to find out.