Nexus Collections and what it means for Wabbajack (Patreon)

As you may or may not know, today the Nexus updated us on their progress on "Collections" (https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14538). This is pretty much like it sounds, an collection of mods that can be automatically installed via Vortex (or other mod managers). So what does this mean for Wabbajack?

As part of these changes the Nexus is making files immutable (they can't be deleted, only archived), which will help us long-term as it means lists will break less often, and we won't have to worry about updating and healing lists. So that's a good thing.

Also, the Nexus approach will most likely be open-source, so once we see the spec/implementation for collections it should be easy to write a collections to ModOrganizer 2 converter for Wabbajack, we'll see once Collections come closer to release.

As far as competition goes, I think there's room for both projects in this space. Wabbajack is focused mostly on ModOrganizer2, and supporting highly integrated complex lists. On the other hand Collections appear to be closer to what their name implies: a collection of archives to install plus a few supporting files, and their LOOT metadata. We'll see in the future how Collections handle things like merged mods, ESL flagging, BSA repacking, etc. But these are all fairly advanced features that only apply to Bethesda games, so at least at first, I suspect we'll see these features lacking from Collections.

Anyway, it's good to see some progress here, we've come a long ways from 2 years ago when the idea of automated modlist installers was deemed "impossible" by many. Now it appears we'll have two major projects in the area.

Once we learn more about collections I'll be sure to post my thoughts and a technical deep-dive on their implementation. But until then, thanks for the support, we're not going anywhere, and thanks for being awesome.