Mod folder

[Noraf]

The solution to this is to place your "Always" used mods into the PDLC Folder of the game (Where your DLC is downloaded and installed), which means they will get loaded every time you launch the game, regardless of which mod folder you select beforehand.

That is a good tip, thank you

Edit :
That's 111 mods i don't have to duplicate any more

[DEERE317]

	Like I said people who use the exact same mods across the board on multiple saves, can do so by placing those mods into the PDLC Folder so they'll always be loaded when the game is launched and available to select on the mod screen prior to starting/loading a save and therefore you only require one copy of those mods on your system. It just is incredibly bad to have one Mod Folder and be loading every single mod you have each time you launch the game, if you're only using a fraction of them in a save. Also it removes the headache of having to scroll through a huge list of mods activating and deactivating what you want or don't for a save. With a separate mod folder, you can just quickly hit the select all on game creation and you are away. I would never dream of using one mod folder and loading the 262GB of mods, which is basically every mod I've ever downloaded, every time I launch the game, when I'm at any time I'm probably only using 3-4GB of mods on any save. So I'll always use separate mod folders, and actually have an entire hard drive in my PC dedicated as a 'Farm Sim' drive, where it just contains mod folders for every single save game and multiplayer server I have ever played.

I was saying for those of who use the identical mod set across the board there’s really no purpose to making multiple folders as it would be every mod in PDLC or or multiple copy and pasted folders.
262GB?!? Whoozer...
Mines a little less... 30gb-50gb is my guess (a lot of Euro stuff O never use yet tell myself I will.)
Also what’s the point of disabling mods in the mod selection menu outside of unwanted scripts and geos? (The scrolling through mod list isn’t a problem in my case as I only have Seasons Geos to disable.)

[RED_Smith]

I have to agree about using multiple mod folders. Especially if you do different servers. When you play on that server you swap in that folder. I have seen it several times where a player tries to log into the MP server and has issues. Oh they have the map in their folder but they updated to the newer version for the SP game and the MP server is still running the old one. Or it is the same issue with a piece of equipment. Sometimes it's reverse with the MP server with the newer update. With a folder specifically for that server you don't have the risk of screwing up your SP games, losing equipment, etc. For your own games, your call, but for MP servers, I would suggest it is the smart way to go.

What would be a great add would be the ability for FS to recognize that we play multiple maps and or servers and let you have multiple mods folders and you can check the one you want to use at start.

[DEERE317]

Or maybe some sort of mod selection tool to prevent copies of files in multiple folders wasting space. Wait that sounds familiar...?

[Mwal]

Yeah I’m a one folder guy, I can wait the extra 20 seconds to load I don’t have ocd. That just turns into a game of I’m buying a new tractor, unsure though better check 6 other folders to see if I should add that one into this one that maybe would be better

[cwattyeso]

What do you label the different folders, so they show up in game correctly?

I have one folder labelled "Original Mod Downloads" which is where every mod, every version of a mod gets placed when downloaded, these are the raw/base/unedited version of every mod I have ever downloaded for FS19. This original mod download folder contains often times multiple copies of the same mod, because I keep every version, so if I don't like an update or change in a mod, I can always roll back to a previous version.

I then have one folder labelled "Original Map Downloads" which as you can guess is where every single map I have ever downloaded gets stored and kept in it's raw/base/unedited version.

When I am setting up Mod Folders for my saves I use the Folder Naming Method of "FS19_MapName" for my single player saves and "MP_MapName" for my multiplayer saves. Like Red-Smith said above, you definitely must employ separate mod folders when playing multiplayer due to all the issues you can run into with different versions of maps and mods. It's in these save game folders where I then edit and tweak maps or mods depending on what I want to customise for my save game, doing this means I can have the same mods in different saves with differences and tailored to what I'm doing on that save, so for example I could have a trailer on one map which has a capacity of 30k and then the same trailer in a different map folder on say a 4k map might have a capacity of 100k as I need to scale up vehicles for the greater amount of stuff. Same goes with say Global Company Mods, on some saves I might do a tweak to output per hour if I need to speed up or slow down my production, especially useful on saves with seasons where some productions have a seasons output per hour which overrides their default output, and I want to remove that.

I then use a little program on my PC which allows me to switch which mod folder is active and load by click a button for the mod folder, and then there is a button which launches the game, so it takes no additional time for me to switch folders and start the game.

So whatever way players want to manage and organise their install and mods, it's up to them, I just employ the method that makes the most sense to me to prevent issues, is easier to manage with multiple saves and lots or mods and is also best for a multiplayer setup. However if players want to go with a one mod folder approach, that's entirely up to them, as long as they aren't having any issues or conflicts that is fine.

[DEERE317]

Yeah I’m a one folder guy, I can wait the extra 20 seconds to load I don’t have ocd. That just turns into a game of I’m buying a new tractor, unsure though better check 6 other folders to see if I should add that one into this one that maybe would be better

It’s even worse when you like/want to use half the European stuff on a Us map as there’s a bunch of EU stuff I never touch and a bunch of NA stuff I never touch, but like to have “just in case”

[Dairydeere]

I just run one mod folder since I have one gameplay style I seem to replicate across all my savegames lol. Then I have another folder called "other maps", where I only run one map in my mod folder to avoid potential conflicts, and I have various other folders for testing or multiplayer servers. I run about 700+ mods last I checked, so I definitely need to go trimming to get that number back to 500 haha

[DEERE317]

I just run one mod folder since I have one gameplay style I seem to replicate across all my savegames lol. Then I have another folder called "other maps", where I only run one map in my mod folder to avoid potential conflicts, and I have various other folders for testing or multiplayer servers. I run about 700+ mods last I checked, so I definitely need to go trimming to get that number back to 500 haha

Know what you mean, somehow even my grain farm saves go down the dairy thought process...
And the mod folder thing is to true!

[RED_Smith]

What do you label the different folders, so they show up in game correctly?

I then use a little program on my PC which allows me to switch which mod folder is active and load by click a button for the mod folder, and then there is a button which launches the game, so it takes no additional time for me to switch folders and start the game.

I would love to hear more about this. If you are willing to share.

[Dairydeere]

Sounds like he's talking about PV Tools. I've heard good things about it but never felt the need to switch mod folders more rapidly then opening file explorer

[blue_painted]

I'm pretty sure that FS19 does NOT load every mod.

If you watch the disk-reads (procmon from Microsoft system internals) you'll see when the game starts up all the mod files are opened and there are two short reads, typically around 1000 bytes and then 32K bytes. That looks like just reading the name, version and so on. Then when you go to the career screen, there's another set of reads, fetching the map info for your saved games.

Then you click "Continue" and each mod gets two, three or four reads - again, quite small most likely fetching the mod-list icon, you you get the whole list of mods to tick which ones you want in-game.

Finally, you click "Start", and now only the ticked-mods are read: massive big reads, megabytes of it: So I deduce from that only the ticked mods are loaded when the game runs, so as far as game performance it doesn't matter how mods you've got in one folder. Where having lots of matters is the load time in getting the game started, since every mod is looked at twice and that all takes time.

If you want to have a specific mod fold for each map, then I suggest putting your actual mod files somewhere and using MkLink to make hard links to the mods you want to use, then it's just a matter of switching the mod folder in gameSettings.xml