Is there an alternative to Nexus Mods?
I was looking into getting a whole bunch of mods for Fallout and Skyrim and it seems like Nexus is the only game in town. I am not really in the mood to go back and forth 600 times between client and webpage to click on every time I wish to try a collection. I wouldn't mind it if they just severely throttled my downloads, they could just run in the background. But if I have to click the mouse thousands of times every once in a while, I'd rather not mod any game, to be honest.
And although I understand that this is a service and "there is no free lunch", the price they are charging in Brazil is too much for me to be okay with paying. A month of Nexus costs R$51.82, which is 12 bucks more expensive than a month of WoW. I really don't wanna be a "choosing beggar" here, as I know that it is not Nexus's fault that my currency is worth shit. But if there's a cheaper alternative I'll have no problem whatsoever paying for it.
Just for anyone else who isn't aware:
If you don't have a Nexus premium subscription, then installing mod collections via Vortex (the official launcher for Nexus) is a massive pain:
(Keep in mind, the most popular mod collections on Nexus have hundreds of individual mods in them. The most popular Skyrim collection has almost 1600.)
The experience is designed to beat users into submission and drive them towards a premium subscription. I think it's shitty, reflects poorly on Nexus, and I'm not going to give them a pass just because they aren't a big tech company. Did I also mention their subscription price increased dramatically a few months ago, to $90 a year?
Obviously, Nexus has real costs they have to handle. You can't serve billions of mod downloads for free. I just wish they wouldn't resort to dark pattern-esque design choices that artificially make being a free user insufferable.
If only there were a more decentralized method of providing downloads to large numbers of people. A torrent of bits, if you will.
Yes, though I feel like that they would still serve most downloads. Many people are shitty with public torrents and close them as soon as the download is done.
Having said that, it would surely help a bit.
What's the alternative though? It's a "reasonable" hassle that still lets you get the mods, and as someone else already mentioned you can just sign up and then cancel again. At the end of the day if you don't make it annoying to be a free user, people will just continue to be, and then the whole thing blows up.
Torrents are nice and all, but only work if you can get a critical mass, and then you still need something to organize it all, and you probably lose out on literal programs like vortex which have streamlined the entire process.
Now I have heard shady stuff about Nexus and seen a lot of complaints over the years, but I think they catch a lot of unfair flak for just trying to keep the lights on.
I'm by no means defending Nexus and agree that the way it works now is really shitty, but do they still offer a lifetime subscription? I bought it for, I think, $50 many years ago and have more than gotten that much value out of it.
https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14543
They removed the lifetime premium purchase option on August 3rd 2021, so you can't buy it anymore. However, you can still receive it by being a mod author and having any or all of your mods get 30,000 unique downloads.
Wow 30k downloads, is that all?
If you make a good mod, then it's not uncommon to get many, many times more than that.
It's really bad. Every time I get the itch to play Fallout 3, NV, or 4, it's either a day-long wait for mods to download (on 2gb/s fiber connection! It's like the dial up days) or I pay for a month of Nexus's subscription and cancel it when I'm done.
FYI, the free user collection experience is actively being worked on, and was described as having “way more rough edges… than there should be” by Halgari, the lead developer of vortex and the upcoming nexus app
EDIT: an unrelated hijacking of this reply, but OP please consider looking at Wabbajack instead of Collections if you want 600+ mods, Collections are notoriously bad outside of maybe 2 or 3 good ones, and WJ lists tend to be more stable and have more active support communities. I’m a wabbajack author though, so I’m very very biased.
The mod lists I want on Wabbjack are full of mods hosted on Nexus and are subject to the same restrictions.
I know, I was simply talking about the quality of WJ lists vs Collections. Hence “an unrelated hijacking”.
There are auto-downloaders/clickers for Nexus:
https://github.com/parsiad/nexus-autodl
https://github.com/jaylann/NexusAutoDL
https://github.com/greg-ynx/NexusDownloadFlow
I've never used them, so I can't say how well (if at all) they will work, but maybe worth a try?
(Tools like these are also probably the reason Vortex throttles the appearance of mod download buttons 🤷)
This GreasyFork script seems to add an even simpler solution.
Thanks. I was trying to go legit as that does seem like an actual service that cost money to maintain. Even after their dark patterns pissed me off. I made the mistake of mentioning this on Reddit and was crucified as a freeloader. What am I doing on Reddit anyway?
Thanks ;)
On one hand, I get it. Nexus has operating costs and that money has to come from somewhere. But 90/yr is just…not something I have any interest in paying for when their Linux support is so poor. Plus, in general I just don’t feel like I use Nexus often enough to justify any kind of subscription anyways.
So complaining about dark patterns and their relatively high subscription price seems justified unless you’re using them constantly. Reddit readying the pitchforks just seems like typical Reddit and I wouldn’t think anything of it lol. Taking a peak at Reddit every now and then after not looking at it for a year, makes me realize just how much content on there is obvious rage bait. I have to imagine that’s directly related to how hostile the user base can be.
If you like Morrowind, there's portmod, inspired by Portage. The standard repos don't have everything, but they do have a lot. Used in conjunction with OpenMW, which is an open-source recreation of the game engine from scratch.
Morrowind fans are the best.
The main competitor—and the original inspiration for NM's Collections which came years later—is Wabbajack, which I believe still supports automated downloads even on a free NM account. It will be slower but it will be automated.
However Wabbajack has a much more limited library of collections than NexusMods (it was the opposite situation the last time I really looked into this, which was years ago it seems). Still, there are some famous collections that have no automated method at all. It once took me 10 days to install a much older version of this list.
These days, and with enough experience modding Skyrim (I have spent 10x as many hours modding than I have playing Skyrim), I will usually get a Wabbajack list or two and then smash them together with some TESEditing and patching because it still saves me dozens hours of downloading mods. And then I still usually add on more and more and more mods as I play.
I actually have a lifetime membership to NexusMods that I bought before they first raised their prices and I still never use Vortex or their Collections much. I'm years behind on both these things, they seem much more improved than I remember but it does suck that Vortex doesn't allow automated downloads on the free account tier.
Last I checked, wabbajack still needed clicks if you're on a free account
This may have changed since I last tried it with a free account, hm.
It's true. Wabbajack does not host mods. If the mods in your collection are hosted on Nexus, and they usually are, you will be subject to all the same limitations you would have with their official mod manager.
For anyone looking to use Wabbajack with a free Nexus account, I recommend using this to skip the individual mod download clicks: https://github.com/M1n-74316D65/Wabbajack-fast-downloader
Its a little finicky and not 100% user friendly, but I downloaded a 229 mod pack in about ~10-15 minutes (most of that was download time and getting Wabbajack to see the manually downloaded mods)
I had written a whole bit about how collections were easy, and then remembered that I did, in fact, have a subscription for exactly that reason.
Free user has to click on every single mod of a collection. You click on Vortex and then on the website and then on Vortex again... repeat until you end the collection. I looked just now, there is one collection with 1594 mods. That would amount to 3188 clicks, not counting the Alt+Tabs and scrolling.
I think this feels adversarial. It would be better if they either throttled the downloads or just put large collections 100% under a paywall. The notion that someone will sit and do all that clicking seems ludicrous. To know beforehand I can't get a collection is much better than realizing after 200 clicks that I'm not gonna make it!
You could try GameBanana?
https://gamebanana.com/games/4724
Gamebanana is actually quite nice for TF2/source mods, though Moddb was always the premier go-to for full on mods.
Some games on NexusMods have alternative places to download mods (I know Stardew Valley has a couple other places in addition to NexusMods, for example), but that's very dependent on the individual game's community and there still may end up being mods you can only get on Nexus. That said, I've never used collections or Vortex so I don't really have experience with those or with whether any alternatives have similar functionality available for free.
Have you heard of wabbajack?
Surprised they don't do regional pricing
If only the base games was made so well they didn't require ton of mods to be enjoyed... I'm looking at you, Bethesda.