Road to 1.0 - Generic Downloading Framework (Patreon)

Although the Nexus is the defacto-standard source for downloading mods, there are a surprising amount of mods that exist on other sites: Lovers Lab, ModDB, tesall.ru to name a few. Unfortunately many of these sites have custom login systems and captchas. Instead of attempting to circumvent these systems, we took a different approach with Wabbajack: we embedded a browser in the app.

As you probably saw in the latest tutorial video, we now ship Wabbajack with a copy of Cef, a stripped-down version of chromium. This allows us to show users the site's login page and then reuse the HTTP session to make the downloads. The end effect is that we now have a framework we can easily extend to new sites as the need arises. As of Wabbajack 1.0 we support Lovers Lab downloads, but other sites as we find the spare development cycles.

In addition we recently added support for sourcing mod files from the base game's files. This means we can repack game BSAs as part of the install process. Fallout4 modders know this process as "The WorkBase steps". It takes some time to perform, but WJ can open the game's BA2s replace or compress some textures, and then repack them into BA2s which are included in Mod Organizer as mods. So that's yet another installation step that can be removed from the modding guides and replaced with automation.

So that's all for today's update. But if you're interested in playing through Legacy of the Dragonborn V5, be sure to try out the NOISE wabbajack installer, which is a nice lightweight modlist that as of today includes LOTDv5 as part of the install. Making it one of the first molists to support this fantastic mod.