Fear of mods

[Hyper]

fear

[Malthar]

youre just paranoid to ♥♥♥♥ mate, all the evidence you need is the thousands of people downloading and playing with mods from the workshop for years

[Steelfleece]

WIthin and upon your body are countless bacteria and other microbes. In fact, they outnumber the cells in your body significantly. One or two tiny mutations and these little guests may begin to digest you from within and without.

This is highly unlikely, and so is a popular mod's author/s turning to the dark side and adding malignant code to their mods.

So, while waiting for the inevitable microbial uprising, may as well play RImworld modded to the point where you're running a colony with a guest inn and restaurant trying to stay neutral on a world where medieval half-man-half-animals are waging war with airships.

[Narrowmind]

You'll be okay. Steam Workshop is wonderful. Really don't think you have anything at all to worry about, but as for absolute certainty, that's out of our reach. I've never had any problem with any game, but and this and Xcom 2 are the most heavily modded games I play. Never even heard of any issues. Just play the more popular ones with tons of reviews.

[PepitoTacoDriber]

There has been one case in the Garry's Mod Workshop, where developers added screamers to one of the most popular mods in the game. Like TFA or Max Payne Bullet Time, basically they added a jumpscare once you enter the game. There have been rumors of some people adding bitcoin miners to some but thats just a hoax. So no you can't really have malware on steam workshop mods, except for the screamer part.

[Limdood]

If you're that paranoid (unfounded paranoia, btw), just make a backup of your system on an unconnected drive.

It really doesn't matter to us on the forums whether you grab mods or not.

[Robo]

The Steam Workshop is arguably the safest modding distribution service on the web. I reckon that Steam scans all files before uploading them to the workshop, and while it is not perfect, you'll know the mod is laced through the comment section, how many stars and how popular the mod is.

I read your entire statement and found not one mention of "Anti-virus." Out of curiosity, have you ever considered trying out anti virus software? You'll have to face the reality that your system will get a virus, a trojan or what have you one day, and I heavily recommend that you be prepared through a good antivirus program and system restore point should worst come to worst.

[DasaKamov]

I NEED evidence that something like this could never happen in the workshop

You're looking at it backwards, my friend.

Rather, think of it this way: there has NEVER been evidence that viruses have EVER been spread throughout the Steam Workshop, despite millions of users and hundreds of millions of mod files.

That should be reassurance enough.

[Wantoomany]

If you played with mods before, and did not have any problems. Why would you think you would have problems now?

[JE55BUNN1]

No

You're not paranoid. People will always encourage you to swim in deeper water, while they stand on the shore with an excuse like ''not wanting to get their hair wet'' or something along those lines.

Look at the movie Jaws... was the Mayor swimming in the water? No.

Same here.

I keep a Nerf pistol under my pillow because of mods.

[Ziehn]

The worst this workshop has really ever seen is modders throwing a tantrum and changing their mod to change/remove textures. Which was easily fixed by just removing said mod

Mods are not bad as communities like GTA would have you believe from incorrectly labeling the cheat/hack tools as "mods".

To further the fact that mods on the workshop are safe, most of the top downloaded mods are open source. This means every line of code in a mod is open to the public to view and pick through for any malicious lines of code. There are many many many IT professionals in this community that pick through those lines of code for fun. Even closed source mods are easy to crack open and view if anyone so much as suspects any fowl play going on

TL;DR Mods on the Workshop are safe

[Gin]

If you're that paranoid you could probably play the game and install mods from a virtual machine then, altho all the time I used mods from workshop or nexusmods, I never really had any issues.

[Bathory]

Originally posted by Hyper:

I now have a complete new system i don't want to chance anything, i'm just worried that one will give me a virus. Now granted from what i hear mods on the workshop are safe and that it would be impossible to implement malware in the state that mods are in the files, but i'm not to sure Am i just paranoid?

When uploading mods, Steam runs a quick check on the file contents. Not a perfect check, but a check all the same.

Source: I've uploaded mods on Steam Workshop.

[Doomdrvk]

Unfortunately with games which use dlls as their main modding source it is entirely possible for malware to be uploaded. That is if they can get past Steams scans. You will never be 100% safe when downloading anything especially when day one viruses usually aren't found unless they're using a widely distributed framework for weeks at a time. Even if you use a VM there are VM aware viruses which can break containment. So while yes it is entirely possible to get infected as long as you choose to use the internet it's unlikely. Most of us have enough trust in our anti viruses and Steam that it won't happen or that it does happen it'll be dealt with before real harm is done. Really your habits will save you more like don't download from unknown sites, never run a random application with administrator rights and always have some sort of virus protection to have the potential to catch something before it causes harm and do common virus scans or even throw the file in virustotal first.

[VoiD]

I've downloaded them for years, never had an issue.

Actually, I don't even use any antivirus, sometimes I run a scan every 1 or 2 years and there's never anything.

It's really hard to get a virus nowadays if you get content from trusted sites and platforms, like steam, youtube, etc.. And never, ever, ever click any links people send you or from emails, if someone tells me about some link or site I should check out I just type the site's name on google and find it myself instead of clicking their link.

Oh, also, use the Brave Browser, it blocks pretty much everything from random pages, including ads, so it's really hard for anything to get through.

[Gnasty Gnorc]

If y ou're that worried, simply don't use mods. Problem solved.

Why spend that much money to build a rig if you're computer illiterate and don't understand what you're doing? Seems like wasted money