Adding mods
With Vintage Story you can have your cake and eat it too. 100 or more player-made modifications ("mods") can be added to the already rich, high performance base game of Vintage Story! It is a very mod-friendly game.
If you desire to expand your gaming experience with some of the awesome mods made by other players - there are new blocks and objects, new creatures, beautiful shaders, recipe tweaks, quality of life improvements, one which transforms Locusts into minions to do your every bidding, and many others - the best place to look for them is on the official Mod DB. You can also find a few additional mods on the official forums. We generally advise that you check which game version or versions a mod requires, to make sure it matches the game version you are currently playing.
TL;DR: Download mods and drag them to the game's Mods folder. Using the in-game Mod Manager, you can enable or disable mods as you want, for each time you play.
A planned future update, most likely Vintage Story 1.15, will allow servers to automate this process - so when you connect to a multiplayer server which offers a modded game, it will automatically set up the mods correctly for that server on the player's side. Meanwhile in 1.14.8, if you want to play on a modded server, follow the server-owner's instructions about which mods to install.
Installation in detail
Most mods download as a .zip file. Locate the file you just downloaded - in modern browsers such as Chrome, you can right-click on the file downloaded notification and choose "Show in Folder". Or your browser's downloads list (Ctrl+J) may have a button to show each downloaded file in its folder. Or on Windows you can perhaps look in the Downloads folder through File Explorer.
Once you got a hold of the mod file in question, copy or move it into the game's Mods folder. The Mods folder can be accessed through the game: in the main menu screen, click on the Mod Manager tab then click the Open Mods Folder button, and a new window will open with the Mods folder.
Alternatively, you can access the Mods folder through File Explorer. If you didn't not change the installation directory, the game installed to the Application Data folder on Windows. You can get there by
- Hitting key combination Winkey+R. That should open a text field dialog
- Type in
%appdata%/VintagestoryData/Modsand hit enter
Once you're in the Mods folder, drag and drop the mod file from the download folder to the Mods folder - or you can use copy and paste commands as you prefer. Do not extract the mod zip. Just place the .zip file into your Mods folder, that's all you have to do. In the game's main menu Mod Manager, click the Reload Mods button - or else close and reopen your game. The mod should be loaded and listed in the mod manager. Congratulations on your very first modded Vintage Story Experience!
The base game is a mod!
Note that the game comes with three mods pre-installed named Essentials, Creative Mode and Survival Mode. Those three are the standard 'vanilla' game: they are required, you should normally always have all three enabled! That's right, the standard Vintage Story game is actually a mod itself! The developers do that to show what is possible in a mod, and to make sure that modders have the same access to the game engine that Vintage Story has.
Video
In the following video you can see how to install mods (German).
