How many mods do you have?

[Jaime]

Hello,

After my 78th mod install and 12 minutes of waiting for startup I started to wonder, how many mods do I have in comparison to other ksp players? So how many mods do you have? how long is your load time to get KSP running?

[OhioBob]

I prefer a lightly modded game.  I'm usually at about 20 to 30.  The most I've ever had installed at one time was about 40.  I know there are some players who have a couple hundred or more.  I couldn't possibly use that many mods, so I see no reason to install them.

My load time is about 1 to 2 minutes, depending on what I have installed.

(edit)

I would say I use about 10 mods or so that are either base requirements (ModuleManager, Kopernicus), or utility mods (KER, KAC, etc.).  On top of that I have probably another 10 or so that are visual and immersion mods (EVE, scatterer, real plume, etc.).  The rest varies, usually planet packs or part packs.  Though I've found that the more I play, the less I like part packs.  At one time I used several part packs, now I use only a couple that add perhaps a couple dozen parts to fill in some gaps.
 

Edited November 20, 2018 by OhioBob

[Snark]

Moving to Add-on Discussions.

[RealKerbal3x]

9 minutes ago, OhioBob said:

I prefer a lightly modded game.  I'm usually at about 25-30.  The most I've ever had installed at one time was about 40.  I know there are some players who have a couple hundred or more.  I couldn't possibly use that many mods, so I see no reason to install them.

Same here. I only have 30ish mods installed. I also frequently look through my Gamedata folder and think ‘Do I really need mod xyz?’

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Jaime said:

So how many mods do you have?

It varies from career to career.  My usual mode of playing KSP looks like this:

1. Decide on what "gameplay" mods I want to run for that career.  (e.g. life support?  KIS/KAS?  Extraplanetary Launchpads?  Some planet pack that reconfigures the solar system?  etc.)
2. Decide on a "story arc" for the mod (i.e. what's the "goal" that I'm working towards?  what does "done" look like?)
3. Play it until I reach the goal.
4. Start over with a new career and go back to step #1. 

So in any given career, the number of mods will vary.

I do have a set of "core" mods that I always play with, because I find KSP to be "unplayable" without them-- i.e. they're not gameplay in terms of how the game works, but rather, usability-related "quality of life" mods.  These mods include all of my own mods (well, of course! otherwise I wouldn't have written them), and a handful of other folks' mods.  Around a dozen altogether.

On top of the dozen-or-so "must-have" mods, I'll usually have anywhere from one to half a dozen additional mods that actually affect gameplay significantly.  These are the ones that vary on a per-career basis.  This is how I keep the game "fresh" and replayable for me, since each time I play a new career, I mix things up a bit.

So, overall, I'm roughly in the 12-to-20-mods range (plus Making History).

1 hour ago, Jaime said:

how long is your load time to get KSP running?

About one minute (that's from the initial double-click on KSP_x64.exe until the main menu pops up).  Though it should be mentioned that my PC has quite a lot of RAM, and an SSD as its main system drive, so it's pretty fast about this sort of thing.

1 hour ago, Jaime said:

12 minutes of waiting for startup

Yeesh!  Holy cow, how do you stand it?  If I had to wait 12 minutes for the game to start up... I'd probably end up hardly ever playing!

Even my one-minute startup time is slow enough to be moderately irritating to me.  You must be a lot more patient than I am. 

[DStaal]

I'm on the other end of the spectrum - while I have a few mods I consider essential, I tend  to throw in everything that looks good.  My current count is somewhere around 200 mods.  Load times for me are much faster than they used to be - in the order of 10-15 minutes I think, but could be shorter.

On my old computer I used to start KSP, then go leave to cook and eat, and come back in time for it to finish loading - load times were over half an hour or more.  I still tend to start KSP and walk away and do something else, but now I don't plan an hour in advance.

[Superfluous J]

My "stock" install is about 20 mods that are for the most part quality of life. For me QoL is: if you watched a replay of my game without the UI up, you wouldn't be able to tell (at least for sure) if I was using them. Things like RCS Build Aid, Kerbal Engineer, and Editor Extensions. A handful are visual, like Distant Object Enhancement. And a couple more fix things that I think are "wrong" in the game, like ForScience.

Most any career I use has those plus the 5-10 or so mods that tailor that career to whatever I'm doing.

[Tyko]

I have ~90 mods installed plus a whole folder full of custom configs I've written - in many cases to make the other mods play better together. I've been using the same set of mods for a while now and I've been able to fix most of the annoyances. 

I'm pretty happy with the game I'm playing now. I've even thought about trying to share my setup because I feel like it's a really playable, stable game.

It's taken a lot of work to get everything working and I'm very reticent to add any new mods now because I'm finally at a place where i can play.

[themaster401]

About 150 mods as noted by AVC, though I have well over 170 checked on CKAN and more unaccounted for by either. Let's say 175 mods, with load times of about 10 minutes.

Surprisingly, the install plays at 120 fps with dips to 60, though high part counts are a different story. The game's become a LOT more optimized than it was when I had first started playing. Hopefully my planetary bases will run at more than 5 fps someday, though perhaps that may be a personal problem...  

[Chel]

40 mods. 1 folder. My CPU is being held hostage! That's a Star Wars prequel meme by the way

[Geonovast]

69 Right now, waiting on a few for 1.5 updates.  Although I have a few for 1.3 or 1.4 that are working fine.

About 11,000 MM patches.  Just a hair under 5 minutes to load.

[MaximumThrust]

125 folders in GameData, have no ideia how many individual mods this makes, a lot of them are only MM patches and other modifications I did on my own. My load time: 176.6563s (I got it from the log), It get under 2 minutes if I'm only reinitializing the game.

A SSD helps a lot, it's essential when playing Kerbal, for me it reduce the loading time by half (it was 342.4104s). The rest of the computer didn't changed almost nothing to me in load times (I compared a 8 year system with a pretty decent modern one). Only make sure you have enough RAM - which isn't easy to know, KSP stops filling it around 90% IIRC. You should experience shuttering if the RAM gets full.

Punning the unused parts is also very recommend.

Other thing that helped me a lot was reducing the size of some textures, especially some 4k ones. Reducing the texture by half reduces the size by 4, (and the time it takes to load), almost no difference for me in quality the game after. The tool I used for that and recommend is Ordenator.

When prunning or reducing the sizes of textures, know what you are doing and make backups. It's not hard, but you can mess up stuff if done wrong.

Edited November 22, 2018 by MaximumThrust

[Curveball Anders]

12 mods

30 sec to menu

40 sec to loaded career

 

[534443]

69 mods (including my own) 

I used to play with 100+ mods until recently, but then I decided to cut it down to the 'essential'.

Now I am almost stock... 

[dundun94]

24 minutes ago, 534443 said:

69 mods

NOICE!!!

[razark]

Four minutes, three seconds from click to main menu.

[Ger_space]

91 mods counted by avc, 

About 4 to 5 minutes until screen for a first load, a Faster on the second.

 

[Dux Aquila]

This is a little embarrassing...   I have 332 mods only on CKAN, and I have not counted the loading time, but is long enough

[panarchist]

I play KSP on Win10 on a Dell Inspiron 7570. On my main game save I have 70-80 mods, and I have 32GB of RAM. Load times are about 20 minutes with that many mods. My other saves are more lightly modded: 20-40 mods. The main save writes something like 15k Module Manager patches, which is a big part of the load time. Part of the reason why is that I have EVE, Kerbal Konstructs + Kerbinside, Kopernicus, and 2-3 custom solar systems all running on that instance of KSP.

[Tonka Crash]

90 mods according to CKAN, 4831 patches, 1:50 from click to main menu when loading from cache. I'm running KSP on a mildly overclocked Hades Canyon NUC with Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD and 32GB RAM.

[Snark]

13 mods (plus Making History) at the moment, though it varies from career to career and on most careers I've got a few more than this.

0:45 from initial click to main menu.  My machine's not an especially overclocked beast or anything, but it does have an SSD, which helps load time quite a bit.

[LjSpike]

79 Mods and making history.

 

Not sure on start-up time, not timed it myself. Usually I make a cup of tea while it's loading. Can't be flying those United Kerbdom rockets with no fuel!

[mrclucks]

72 mods currently, but theres still some mods that need to get updated/loaded to CKAN.  Takes me about 3 minutes to load the main menu.  

After the 64 bit version of KSP released i havent had to wait more than 5-6 minutes, however i havent played realisim overhaul or any super modded version which i assume will take alot longer to load.  @Jaime are using the 32 bit or 64 bit executable or KSP?

[Gr@y]

About 120 folders in GameData, about 10 minutes of loading.

[Gapone]

42 mods, inclding MM patches and stock part edits.

Some part mods stripped down.

11 minutes to load.

4 gb RAM.

Windows 7 64.

Help.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Gapone