Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Users should be able to sort their own installed mod list by the last time they were updated on their own machine.

What?

When in the "Manage" tab in the mod list, there should be another column that shows when the mod was last updated on the user's current machine. When they install it for the first time, that would be the "most recent" time, and anytime the mod is updated on the user's machine, that date would update to "now". The user should be able to sort this list by this date column, so that they can review the most recent mods that were updated on their machine.

Why?

I play with a lot of mods. Sometimes, when I boot into Factorio and update my modlist, some of those mods break. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to figure out what is causing it - the error trace that it shown will often point out the exact mods that are responsible, and I can just bring that trace over to the mod page and often the mod author can get it sorted. Other times, it's not really that simple.

For example. I haven't played Factorio in about a week. I booted up the game today, checked the mod list, and saw that there were a number of mods to update (something like 15 to 20, which isn't unusual). I just updated all of them and rebooted my game. I reviewed the changelogs one at a time, but I mean nothing stood out as being something that might cause some issues when I restarted Factorio.

When I restarted, I was met with this error:



As of writing, the mod that is called out there (Quality Seeds) has not been updated in 7 months. The point of showing this error isn't to call out the mod author or anything like that - I will likely open a post in their mod page once I've done a little more digging on my end. I've played with this mod installed for quite a while now and haven't had any issues, but now apparently it is broken. But the problem is - how was it broken just now? Certainly this is actually an issue with one of the other mods that I have installed getting updated, but Quality Seeds doesn't appear to have any clear dependencies that I can point a finger at, so presumably one of the most recent updates to some other mod has caused some unexpected issue with Quality Seeds.

But the way things work now, I can't really figure out what mods I actually installed recently to start narrowing down what could be causing the issue from the mod list itself. I guess I could go into the mod folder and sort that list to see the most recent updates, but I shouldn't need to do that. Also doing it that way would be kind-of annoying as well, since I wouldn't be able to easily review the changelog of those mods (which is easy to do in the mod list in-game).

It would be much easier to figure this out if I could sort the mod list by the last time each mod was updated on my machine.