Hi everyone, I can't find a direct answer anywhere can someone please help ? I have 275 mods running on a dedicated server was fine at home but not running right online because the dedicated server is Linux and loading the mods in I guess metadata priority rather than the order I have specified in the sbinit.config. What is the correct load order for mods in Starbound I'm very confused. For example Skyrim would look like this: Patches and bug fixes Big mods and overhauls that affect the entire game Quest mods (big or small) Environments/weather Overhauls Large add-ons that add cities/towns/land masses Adds buildings to current cities/towns etc etc etc Whereas Starbound for example let's take OptimizeBound, which compresses all PNGs to improve performance. In my opinion that would be the last thing to load so it can compress everything that's loaded before it, yet the author has set the PriorityID to -9998 meaning it would load BEFORE everything. I'm very confused with how the load order works can somebody please explain it to me because I don't know how to prioritize the mods I'm going to unpack them and manually set a priority.
Optimize bound took out all the images compressed them manually then repacked them. It doesn't compress new images - hence the order for it is irrelevant. Infact it might even need to be high on the list incase another mod wants to make a visual change to an existing image. Load order of Starbound is reasonably complicated with no real right answer. The reason for this is properly done mods use Patch files to edit existing code. So essentially load order would be features you really want on the bottom of the list and features you don't mind being overwritten to be on the top.
There are not many cases where you would need to control load order via priority. But know that changes from mods which load sooner can be over-written by mods that load after. In the case of optimizebound, they made it load right after vanilla on purpose precisely because it replaces numerous vanilla files even if those files are only PNGs. When mod order is important, that's usually handled via "requires" or "includes" in the _metadata which makes that mod load AFTER the mods listed (if present). You'll find far more examples of where the order doesn't matter than you will cases where it does matter. One thing I will point out though - If you have some manually installed mods and some workshop loaded mods, then it will load all the manually installed mods BEFORE loading the workshop installed mods. IIRC even "includes" and "requires" won't supersede this. As though it is an entirely different phase.
Hey thanks for the reply after extensive testing there is a reason to I find. Particularly when I went to dedicated server because it runs on Linux (3rd party service, pingperfect) because it ONLY goes by the metadata priority. Some mods like patches etc, sometimes the modders make mistakes and either don't assign priority or assign wrong numbers etc.. It's fine, was long and painful but I did it. I made a list of mode I use and their priority, I went by 10/20/30 etc.. Edited the metadata on every single one of them and I Have the load order the way I want it. Some of it is unecessary obviously but that's fine I have 100% granular control now over my mods and I have bats and scripts I've written to speeding things up when updates come out
