Separate mods in different saves

[RealKerbal3x]

I have a few mods installed on my KSP at the moment - about 10 I think. However, while I may use a certain mod in my main sandbox save, I don't use that mod in my career save. So my idea is that each savegame has its own mod folder, and they can each have a completely different mod set to each other. This would mean that you could have super-modded GPP on one save and totally stock on another, essentially removing the need to have multiple installations of KSP.

I'm not a game developer by any means, so I'm not sure how it could be made to work, or if it would be at all possible. But it would be great.

Any thoughts??

[pandaman]

You can do this already.  Copy the whole KSP folder to give you additional 'installs', as opposed to saves.  You can then add whatever mods you like to each install, exactly as you do now, but each install can have a unique set of mods. You will need to create a separate shortcut for each install though.

Many players do this and keep a 'pure stock' install to verifiy if any bugs are mod related.

[RatchetinSpace]

8 hours ago, pandaman said:

You can do this already.  Copy the whole KSP folder to give you additional 'installs', as opposed to saves.  You can then add whatever mods you like to each install, exactly as you do now, but each install can have a unique set of mods. You will need to create a separate shortcut for each install though.

 Many players do this and keep a 'pure stock' install to verifiy if any bugs are mod related.

This is what most players (including me) do. The game as it is currently setup cannot seamlessly switch on and off mods because it loads all the GameData on startup. You'll notice that if you modify a GameData file while in-game, nothing changes until the game restarts and the file is reloaded.

[RealKerbal3x]

8 hours ago, RatchetinSpace said:

This is what most players (including me) do. The game as it is currently setup cannot seamlessly switch on and off mods because it loads all the GameData on startup. You'll notice that if you modify a GameData file while in-game, nothing changes until the game restarts and the file is reloaded.

I would love to do this, but generally I install mods through CKAN as it makes it easier (some mods have very complex installation procedures) and I don't know if CKAN would know how to differentiate between my different savegames.

[AVaughan]

I have multiple copies of ksp with different mod sets (and even different ksp versions).  I just place a copy of ckan.exe in the ksp directory (beside ksp_x64.exe) and run ckan from there.  

[stibbons]

1 hour ago, RealKerbal3x said:

I would love to do this, but generally I install mods through CKAN as it makes it easier (some mods have very complex installation procedures) and I don't know if CKAN would know how to differentiate between my different savegames.

Good news first, the CKAN client can indeed easily manage multiple different KSP installs. See the user guide for some direction on adding new installs.

On 5/6/2018 at 7:24 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

So my idea is that each savegame has its own mod folder, and they can each have a completely different mod set to each other. This would mean that you could have super-modded GPP on one save and totally stock on another, essentially removing the need to have multiple installations of KSP.

Doing this at runtime isn't really possible with the way KSP is designed right now. All of the models and addons are loaded once at startup, and there's no real way to add/remove them dynamically once it's running (there was a mod that could load/unload textures on demand, but it hasn't been maintained for some time).

You may be interested in Game Data Switcher. It's an external program that lets you manage separate GameData folder sets. Requires quitting the game and running GDS to swap between folder sets for different saves, but it's another option that seems to work well.