Help with Downloading Game Mods

[Philippe]

If you haven't installed any mods into anything for a while there are a couple of things you should keep in mind until you get back into the swing of things.

Different people set up their mods differently, most don't self-install, and you wouldn't really want them to even if they did. The reason you don't really want them to self install is that you always need to know what you're getting yourself into when you use a mod. Sometimes a mod will change something by overwriting it that, on reflection, you'll realize that you didn't really want overwritten.

So it's a good idea, when you're about to start adding mods to something, to create a holding folder somewhere safe, and to unzip the mod into that empty folder. Then, when you open that folder up and look into it, you'll be able to figure out exactly what will get changed when you add the mod.

One thing that you should be aware of about mods (and this actually relates to the mechanics of how zip and rar files are made) is that sometimes a mod will be inside a folder of exactly the same name as the game it is going to mod. But sometimes it will be in a folder with an unrelated name. If you dump a mod like that into your game folder nothing will happen, because the mod will be inside a folder that the program won't look into because it doesn't know it exists. So one of the other benefits of always putting a mod into a safe holding area is that you can tell at a glance whether the mod mimics the folder name structure of the game it's going to modify.