v1.4.0: Palworld

Palworld, the thirteenth game

Palworld moves from the roadmap to supported. As always, that means installed, modded and played on real hardware, not that the code has a config entry for it.

Palworld mods come in four different shapes, and each one needs to land somewhere different or it silently does nothing. The plugin now routes all four: pak mods, UE4SS Lua scripts, UE4SS Blueprint mods, and PalSchema's JSON mods, which are folders of json that sit inert anywhere except the framework's own mods directory. Step 1 in the panel installs UE4SS and PalSchema together, so there is nothing to set up by hand.

Getting there took two 100-mod collections, and both found real problems.

Mods that offer alternatives now ask which you want. Some mods ship one archive containing several mutually exclusive versions of the same thing, and a wizard to pick between them. That wizard only ran for Skyrim-style games, so on Palworld every version installed at once: eight variants of a single character fighting over the same assets, which rendered as a mangled blend of all of them. Now the wizard runs for these games too, and when you install a collection the curator's own choices answer it for you.

Mods that would ruin your session install switched off. Two kinds, both found the hard way. One opens a setup window the first time it loads that takes no input at all in Gaming Mode, not from a controller, a keyboard or a mouse, so it cannot be closed and you are locked out of your own game. The other rewrites how characters look on top of every other mod, so in a collection full of character mods everything renders as a broken mix of the two. Both are still installed, so nothing is lost, but the collection page says which mods were left off and why, and My Mods switches them back on with one tap.

Also in this release

• Script extenders now match your installed game version rather than assuming the newest, and say so plainly when no build exists for the version you are on.
• Mod pages prefer the file that matches your game, and mods split across several required files install whole.
• Games installed on an SD card or a second drive are found.
• The adult content gate follows your Nexus account settings instead of demanding UK age verification from everyone.

Thirteen games supported: Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas, Helldivers 2, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Palworld, Resident Evil 4, Skyrim Special Edition, Slay the Spire 2, STAR WARS Battlefront II, Stardew Valley, The Witcher 3.