Factorio Forums

TLDR

Please add a new "Character" tag (or even category) for the mod portal!

Why?

During the past two years, a number of mods providing new player characters have been released (see the dependency list on my character-selector mod miniMAXIme -- there may still be others I'm not aware of). While some of these mods may affect game play (e.g. by changing inventory size, reach etc.), most of these mods are about changing the appearance of the player character in the game by changing graphics/animations and, possibly, sounds. Especially in multiplayer games, this allows players to better identify each other (player color is no longer the only distinction).

In my opinion, none of the tags available as of today really covers such mods. One tag ("Cheats") has the description "Play it your way" -- but obviously, using different graphics for your character is not really cheaty but rather a matter of personal taste.

A new category "Characters" could make sense as well. Among the categories currently available, "Tweaks: Small changes concerning balance, gameplay, or graphics" seems the one to fit best. However, I wouldn't call the changes to graphics "small" as most of the character mods are not about scaling or recoloring the vanilla character, but create new characters from scratch.

This, for the love of god this, searching for character replacements is a nightmare at present. Since there's really no good way to search for them, other than a handful of keywords that get used intermittently in the description, if there even is one. I've had more luck searching by mods that depend on the character helper mod, to the point that close to half of them I was only able to find through that method, and meaning there's probably still a handful of ones I've missed.