Returning player looking for lists of modlists

[Andrew Jolly]

Hi! I'm a returning player from ~2015, never really got involved in the forums before beyond a bit of lurking and reading about mods. I've dropped in here and there and I've never uninstalled the game, I just, I guess, started playing less when life got in the way of shooting rockets around space.

I see from my quick look of the game just now that A LOT has changed in terms of what you get in stock + expansions. The likes of KAC, KAS, KIS all seem to be included as stock in some ways plus a bit of I guess KER in terms of delta V readouts.

I have had a quick look on youtube for current streamers to see what modlists they're playing with, and have some good ideas and have taken a look at CKAN to see what's still working, but I guess I'm asking if there's a good thread or other resource where people share their modlists and justifications - that sort of thing.

In terms of what I'm looking for, honestly I don't often play with sandbox, and probably the main reason I didn't play career much back in the day was I just thought the contract system was a teeny bit broken - so yeah, I guess I'm looking for things that make career & science modes more interesting and difficult. I will definitely be checking out what's up with the most recent iterations of life support mods, but Kerbalism just seems a little bit too much like hard work right now - I could probably do without performing ullage burns...

I'm an astrophysics researcher in my dayjob so I'm quite happy crunching all sorts of numbers and optimisation.

I know the answers to all these questions are probably on the forum already, but I did a quick search and couldn't find anything recent and obvious. Thanks!

[Starhawk]

Hello and welcome to the KSP Forum!

Finding the mods you want will probably take a bit of exploration.  There are any number of mods that alter science and economics in the game.  It may take a bit of reading various threads to find the mods that will give you the play experience you want.

Glad to have you aboard!

Happy landings!

[jimmymcgoochie]

My advice is to think of a specific goal e.g. get a 100-Kerbal colony set up on Duna, and then pick some mods that you think will help you get to that goal. Just going in and blundering along without really knowing what you're going to do next can often lead to losing interest and giving up, but so can adding a ton of mods and being bewildered by the vast array of parts and systems.

My very much not comprehensive list of suggestions is as follows:

• Economy: StageRecovery/FMRS to recover dropped stages, The Gold Standard for a mining-based source of income.
• Science: Kerbalism to make experiments run over time and in the background, DMagic Orbital Science for more experiments, [x]Science and ScienceAlert if you're using the stock science system, Tarsier Space Telescopes for, well, telescopes in space, but also a rover mast with a laser, SCANsat to make terrain/biome/visible/resource maps of planets and get science.
• General gameplay: Strategia to shake up the admin strategies, Kerbal Construction Time to make rockets take time to build instead of instantly appearing on the launchpad, ResearchBodies to hide most planets and require you to 'discover' them.
• In-flight tools: MechJeb to automate almost everything, Kerbal Engineer Redux for all the data the stock readouts don't give you, Extraplanetary Launchpads to build vessels in flight, Sandcastle to make individual parts in flight, SimpleLogistics to move resources between different vessels when landed within physics range (no need for hoses!). KIS and KAS still have some things to offer that the stock EVA construction doesn't, but a lot of what they can do is now covered by the stock systems and I don't think KIS/KAS are fully compatible with the stock inventory stuff, so it's up to you if you want to use those.
• Crewed vessel parts: Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux (SSPXR) for many great-looking parts for your stations and even bases, all with (optional) internal views too, Kerbal Planetary Base Systems (KPBS) for many modular base parts and tools to assemble them on-site, Near Future Spacecraft for additional crew pods in varying sizes.
• Probe parts: Near Future Exploration which includes a variety of new probe cores, structural parts to match those and (Re-)stock probe cores and a whole new antenna system, ProbesPlus for semi-Kerbalised versions of real probes such as Venera, Surveyor and Cassini-Huygens (it says 1.4.3 on CKAN but it works fine in 1.12.3 as far as I can tell), OctoSat Continued if you want a really modular system to build your probes from, SSR MicroSat for a dinky little probe that can still pack quite a punch.
• Rocket parts: KeR-7 if you have the Making History DLC as it fleshes out the Soviet parts with service modules, engines and a proper core tank for the R-7/Soyuz rocket among others, 
• General parts: Basically anything by Nertea (Restock/+, Near Future everything, Far Future, Kerbal Atomics, Cryo Engines/Tanks) and Angel-125 (Mk-33, Sandcastle, Buffalo, Blueshift...) as their stuff never disappoints.
• Stock system planet packs: Snarkiverse (rearranges the stock system), Outer Planets Mod (adds stock-ish Saturn/Uranus/Neptune/Pluto), Alternis Kerbol (rearranges the stock system and redoes some stock bodies). OPM can be used with both Snarkiverse and Alternis Kerbol to expand the system.
• Stock-scale planet packs (replaces the stock system entirely): Galileo's Planet Pack and Grannus Expansion Pack, can be used separately but are designed to be used together, options available to make either system the home one or put both as interstellar options from the stock system; Beyond Home, has a binary star system so requires a special Kopernicus config or solar panels won't work right, also features (some of) Kerbol system as a second star system, Kerbal-scale Real Solar System (KSRSS) does exactly what it says in the name.
• Upscaled planet packs: JNSQ redesigns and expands on the Kerbol system at 2.7x stock scale, some other planet packs also have dedicated configs to make them larger (GPP/GEP, KSRSS and Beyond Home have configs to scale them up to a similar size to JNSQ) while you can make many others- including the stock system- larger using Sigma Dimensions and appropriate rescale configs. Above ~3x scale you'll probably need a mod (e.g. SMURFF) to rebalance parts as stock and stock-balanced parts become very underpowered.
• Realistic KSP: Real solar system, Realism Overhaul and Realistic Progression 1 (RSS/RO/RP-1) to make KSP as realistic as possible- real rocket engines and parts, technologies unlocked in the order they were developed in reality, engine failures/ullaging/performance variations and more based on historical data. Not for the faint-hearted and not (yet) fully compatible with KSP 1.12, but rewarding once you get over the learning curve.

I haven't used all of these mods so I can't say that they'll all work properly or that they'll play nicely together, but I hope there's enough in there that you can find something that you like the look of.

[EdwardKerman]

this was very helpful, thanks.

[EdwardKerman]

I've only just joined the forums but have been reading through the forums for a year and a bit, and have had KSP for a few years now. I only thought to make an account today.

[Vanamonde]

2 hours ago, EdwardKerman said:

I've only just joined the forums but have been reading through the forums for a year and a bit, and have had KSP for a few years now. I only thought to make an account today.

Well, glad you finally did.

[linuxgurugamer]

I strongly recommend that you use CKAN to install the mods that you want.  It will install them correctly along with the needed dependencies.

There are some mods which don't support CKAN, if you use those I'd recommend you install them after using CKAN

[HebaruSan]

18 hours ago, Andrew Jolly said:

I'm looking for things that make career & science modes more interesting and difficult.

18 hours ago, Andrew Jolly said:

have taken a look at CKAN

Welcome back! Since it may not be immediately obvious, you can search for career and science related mods in CKAN like this, and you can sort by the "Downloads" column to find roughly the most popular such mods:

[EdwardKerman]

I've never really used mods before, but I recently tried accurately landing a SSTO booster and it ended up as a ballistic missile so do you know any atmosphere trajectories mods which I could use

 

[EdwardKerman]

it would be really useful

[Jacke]

On 3/4/2022 at 8:57 PM, EdwardKerman said:

I've never really used mods before, but I recently tried accurately landing a SSTO booster and it ended up as a ballistic missile so do you know any atmosphere trajectories mods which I could use

Try Trajectories.  Also, I suggest you try out mods a few at a time to get a better appreciation for them.

 

[EdwardKerman]

Thanks! I've installed trajectories, and it works like a charm!

[Catto]

You should get all of nertea's mods. Just go to their spacedock page.

Search up "nertea spacedock" and get the mods that say they're 1.12.

Edited March 12, 2022 by siklidkid

[darthgently]

On 3/10/2022 at 10:18 AM, EdwardKerman said:

Thanks! I've installed trajectories, and it works like a charm!

If you like Trajectories now, wait until you are aerobraking  via Laythe into the Jool system.  A godsend as the relative speeds can be way up there with a solar orbit followed by getting sucked into Jool's gravity well

Edited March 12, 2022 by darthgently