Jill

I've been messing around with modding Lethal Company recently because it's quite a fun game to mod. After getting set up, with a bit of pre-requisite knowledge it's fairly trivial to add new scrap to the game and the game's popularity is such that there's already a number of libraries (maybe too many) so that you're not reinventing the wheel when it comes to certain things, but this post isn't going to be about that process.¹ Instead, it's gonna be about a phenomenon I've noticed which doesn't apply solely to this game but it is where I noticed it.

The main platform for distributing mods for this game, as with many Unity games, is Thunderstore. These mods are typically installed using the r2modman which is linked up to Thunderstore. I've got opinions on this but those aren't relevant right now, what I did think was interesting was the strange disparity that this mod manager+platform has caused in literacy when it comes to installing mods.

Most mods are built as BepInEx plugins. This means that installing them is as simple as dropping BepInEx itself into the game folder (if not already installed) and then usually dropping the mod files into BepInEx's plugins subfolder. Takes a bit of explaining for someone who's completely in the dark but doable.

The strange thing is, there are so many mods that flood the game's Thunderstore page which are explicitly labelled as being inside jokes that nobody else would get or want or specifically mentioned as just being made "for friends".

So, it seems to me that there's 3 possibilities:

1. These folks did not want to explain to their friends how to install the mods, which is somewhat understandable.
2. These folks simply don't care about the nature of the mod and decided it should be public anyway
3. These folks somehow, despite knowing how to create the mod themselves, believe that publicly releasing the mod on Thunderstore is the only means to distribute mods and don't realise manual distribution is a possibility.

There's even a bunch of mods that are vaguely listed as "for personal use" without mentioning friends or anything which just raises more questions.

I don't want to make assumptions on this, all 3 seem equally likely, but the third possibility is the most fascinating to me. I'm sure most cases of this fall into the first 2 categories but I'm sure there's a non-zero number of cases that fall into the third. It reminds me of the supposed phenomenon where recent generations have had declining tech literacy due to the insistence of modern technology to abstract away things like the filesystem in favour of "user friendliness". In this case, it'd be the existence of the mod manager abstracting away the installation process so much that people don't realise that manual installs are possible.

This is all just me speculating. I don't know if this is actually happening, and I'm sure it's been a thing long before r2modman or Thunderstore where people would prefer to install mods via a manager without knowing the manual process, but the main difference here is that because r2modman is so up front and centre with its connection to Thunderstore with no easily accessible manual installation option that I can see in my current version (which is a bit out of date), this results in a lot of bizarre clutter on a game's Thunderstore page.

I don't want it to sound like I'm complaining that people lack information or anything, I just think it's a fascinating state of affairs that modding is in a state right now that people can be literate enough to create mods for a game while also not realising that there is a manual way to install that mod outside of uploading it to Thunderstore. And again, this might not even be the case but it seems plausible given how common you see this stuff.

It's also interesting to think about as the developer of a game's first true mod tool. Right now installation of both Astralathe and mods for it is completely manual even down to manually editing the load order to add the mod to the load list, mainly because I'm not really a good tools dev and I'm not very good at GUI stuff like say, creating an actual mod manager. The easier you make something for the user the more abstracted it gets and the less the user will inherently know about the underlying processes that are being abstracted away for them. I wonder if there's an ideal balance.

If you're wondering, I do think that in this case it'd be a better experience for everyone if something was done to try and mitigate this. It doesn't seem convenient for the creators to have to create Thunderstore pages and then this leads to minimum effort pages which makes it a little daunting to swim through the mod list, because then it's filled with so many mods with incomprehensible names, thumbnails and vague descriptions. Today I saw a mod that specifically requested that it not be downloaded because it's not complete, so this isn't even contained to people who just want to share their mods with friends.

1. Though I may make such a post at some point because proper documentation on this is sorely lacking because Discord has all but completely killed indexable information on topics like this

For a significant amount of time, the Fandom-hosted Psychonauts Wikia has been basically the only wiki resource for Psychonauts ever since Double Fine's official PsychoPedia (which was quite barebones but did include info even on a couple of cut concepts) disappeared.

This is, of course, complete and utter shit. I'd wish death upon Fandom but that'd mean a lot of lost information because of how many resources are still shackled to them (sometimes by force) so I can't even do that.

Also unfortunate is that the Psychonauts wikia, like many, has... dubious standards when it comes to information? It is in general quite good, more than average¹ but it's fallen for many of the same pitfalls that many other wikia sites to. Poorly or completely unsourced information, sometimes downright incorrect information and of course the ever classic case of what I like to call "Wikia Trivia Syndrome" where trivia sections tend to end up as something of a dumping ground for (well meaning, but misguided) folks' personal speculation and theories as well as completely inane, insubstantial trivia which isn't at all notable. It's certainly not as bad as other sites but it's there.

Fortunately there are those who recognise this and, undeterred by Fandom's propensity to force itself to the top of searches via SEO abuse, have created an alternative wiki from the ground up, hosted on Miraheze.

This new wiki is quite barebones at the moment and there's still a lot of work to be done to flesh things out. Most pages are just structure with no content and some aren't even that. It is a start though.

Already in place are some pretty good guidelines about citing stuff and ensuring things are labelled properly in regards to canonicity. I've been helping out a bunch and with some framework stuff, creating a bunch of pages and cleaning up existing ones. And me being me, I of course cite things down to specific lines in relevant Lua files.² It's a lot of fun, when the mood strikes I really enjoy the work that goes into writing these pages though I do suck quite bad at actual descriptions so I tend to struggle with those. Still, I'm optimistic.

1. The best sourced, best cited Wikia I've ever seen is The Owl House's which always cites everything though honestly given the nature of that show I'm not entirely surprised.

2. I also finally get justice in Oatmeal's page actually being called Oatmeal instead of PSI-Popper Generator, which is a name lifted from concept art relating to something that no longer actually exists in the game and the devs started calling him Oatmeal everywhere internally and unless they finally acknowledge him otherwise, as far as I'm concerned that's been his "actual" name ever since the PSI-Popper Generator's assets were recycled into becoming Oatmeal.

I opened VS2022's task list to see how many TODOs and HACKs I still have lying around Astralathe's codebase and at the bottom of the list it started showing me TODOs from the Windows SDK.

The way this water effect worked means anything outside the bubble (and the whole screen, if the camera was outside the bubble) was being shown as if it was at 640x480.