Decrease in Mods

Not sure if this is me, but from what ive seen, many mods that were interesting before like the Gavril T-Series Expansion Pack, or RK's Highly Customizable Engines, and possibly more are either outdated or gone, and from my perspectives more mods are focusing on vehicles or liveries and maps, less interesting stuff are being put on the beamng forums (I have tried some)
usually back then in 2024-2025 most or all my mods I downloaded was the ones I was hoping to wake up to. it seems more of these mods are having less content and possibly less effort, I appreciate all those who make SO many mods as people like them diversify the Mod Forums, gives me more choices but honestly I havent seen more major mods being put up on beamng forums, btw this is JUST my opinion, Mods are what makes beamng quite exciting for me. but whatever you think is certainly accepted.

 

Now that I have come across this thread, I find it hard to disagree and I see what you mean. I remember how much more fun mods were only a matter of 3 or 4 years ago when it wasn't just automation mods and config packs. I wish more maps would come out too.

 

Not even config packs anymore, its livery packs that seem all the rage, I dont mean to disrespect for the people that actually post any content for free for all to enjoy, but... It really seems the creative spark that was about when i first joined the forums have slipped away, with the exception of paid mods. That being said however, give it some time and it'll come back, with a new generation, or even some returning members from the dark old ages rekindling a bit of inspiration for beam. It always happens at some point so I remain hopeful

It doesn't help though that some people are much more willing to non constructively criticize free stuff than actually provide useful feedback to the modders, it's easily understandable why so modders have either gone paid or just kept mods to themselves

 

Well, that's actually true. And I think there is logical explanation to that - increase in quality standards. Back in the day, they were much lower compared to what is nowadays. People are just not willing to work that hard anymore.
It is also because there are more modders that come for money or any other reason that is not passion, and other people look at them and start following this trend, sadly. I also believe that maybe some day everything will change for better, but I don't think that right now situation is bad. There are still a lot of high quality and nice mods to play around.

 

damn, this is quite scary, sometimes games end like this, first a decrease in mods, then decrease of updates, but this is just my opinion. I honestly dont think beamng will be unpopular soon, and definitely not for a long time, as new updates always come. I could speculate that beamng developers will allow more space for modding, but honestly the people who work hard everyday making their own personal mods should be acknowledged. but I totally agree that there is still high quality mods and big content mods going around, only if I could reach them easier..

 

I have never and will never make a mod, so I commend anyone who has made one that’s more than just taking a stolen mesh and slapping it on a vanilla car.

I don’t think anything is wrong with the amount or quality of mods. The cream will rise to the top. The vanilla game is filling in the gaps that mods once filled, as time goes on. Quality over quantity. The game is in a great place right now. Dev quality is higher than ever so mod quality needs to align with that, and that’s a lot of work. BeamNG may not look like Forza, but it’s really a AAA title under some rougher paint. As long as the option to mod and download mods is still there, we’ll be aight

 

Making maps takes time, detailing takes time, map mods are just like Jbeam mods with less code and more modeling, that's why even map mods are falling out of favor.

There is no money to be made from the repos, but I do see what you mean, the IKEA effect is real, people think that if something has high effort put into they should be paid for it, but mods aren't like that, they're made for the fun of it, heck, I've been working on a map since 2023 just because I want people to enjoy it, especially because I feel that despite the effort I poured into it, it isn't worth it charging people for it, feeling like you bought a stupid map off of just some guy (see what I did there lol) ruins the fun.

 

If we can't make good car mods, then we should make good map mods, as they're easier to create and can easily look really cool if we add nice touches and details to it.

 

Good mods take time to develop and create look at the Hirochi CCF and its creator and his brother both of them are busy with mod creation, good mods take time to make

For me I flatly refuse to install any automation mod because there are people in there with hundreds of mods to their name and they are all 5 minute builds and they are all rush jobs no time or attention put into them, my own mods I made quite badly but I had help from someone on here to tune them, I have since retired from that line of mod work

Occasionally help out with the odd line of code here and there with mods in the other sections, certainly not skin mods because I have no idea how to do that, I am okay at coding work it just makes sense to me and sometimes I ask for a credit in there to help me get some attention when its required if its a major rewrite or something that I put effort into

 

I feel like theres too many low quality mods on the repo

 

CrashHavenBNG quality of the mods is ok imo

 

I'll tell you something, this stuff is very time-consuming. The Nuova Bolide, which isn't even a whole car, took me a significant amount of time (granted, I had many hardware issues along the way). There's simply a low volume of "big" mods because trying to fit-in with a certain quality standard requires taking a lot of time to learn new features (fading halogens etc.). Although I have to agree, amount of "big" free mods has significantly decreased, with most of the main creators choosing the paid route.

 

Agreed. Making a full car that matches today's standards is like a full-time job. Depending on complexity, only the 3D modeling part can take 100+ hours, or roughly 3 weeks working 8 hours a day (obviously much less if you start with a Forza model). Then you also need to make everything work in game, which can actually take as much as well. If you work/study and still have energy to spend at least a few hours a day just to spit out a mod after a mod, hats off.

In view of the above, no wonder they do. But, I have to disagree. The majority of paid mods are regular content, they very rarely introduce stuff and features that are actually new to the game, so if you mean "big" by size or number of parts, then yeah, maybe. The "big" as in actual improvement mods usually are free, sometimes with paid EA. The CCF is a great example of a mod that both brings regular content and new features.

Thinking about it now, though. Is it that there aren't many major mods being put up on forums, or is it because there's an increase in small, often pretty low effort mods that make those major mods less visible? Just recently we got the F-Series, fake Caterham, and the Stirling of course, which all may not be on par with CCF when it comes to the features included, but they are still decent cars if you crave new content. And in the meantime JAVI makes some cool engines, xpogosam takes care of fine-tuning the ETKs, and if you want to make your car look cool, you can always grab TTB's latest wheels... We might not get as many new mods as a few years ago, but it's not too bad. And I didn't even have to mention my mods lol.

Spoiler

Go on and make some if it's that simple.

 

i believe a large part of it is a lot of people that made great mods dissapeared or are too busy now. and noone has really taken over and its also much harder to make a "good" mods as the developers and communitys standards have gotten higher

 

I agree with this.. I feel like the bigger the modding community gets, the harder it gets to find good mods that arent meshslapped on a random base game car. Im a modder myself and i know alot of people who meshslap. its sad.

 

where you might find these mods that you are talking about? I would surely pay for some of them rn

 

Most of them are still in development as creators are still transitioning to paid stuff like the Holloway Rowe, Kingsway, Sapphire (although that will also have a free version), future Wilkinson, LJ, Lucas releases etc.

 

I feel like that the first BeamNG mod category to be affected by this are Automation mods, they're quite easy to make, and most don't introduce new features, it is extremely rare to see an Automation mod with an integrated BeamNavigator, with three wheels or with excessively small engines, but it'll only get 20 downloads because the "market" is too oversaturated with low quality mods. I once saw an Automation mod that had this exact situation, it had a BeamNavigator integrated and it was pretty fun to drive, but it only had 26 downloads.

I feel like Automation mods are more like children's drawings, if you asked 20k children to make a drawing to hang the best ones on your fridge, most would either recreate something from real life or make something really simple and ugly, then there would be 100 children who make museum-level pieces of artwork, but after going through hundreds bad drawings, you eventually decide to not hang any up, because "they all suck anyways".

But what can we do about this? Nothing. They're all "art" in a creative sense, they're all (mostly) an expression of one's creativity and taking down mods that are though to be "low-quality" would lead to stupid controversies.

Actually, as proof-of-concept I'm going to make a revolutionary ATMN mod that includes some new and never seen things just to show that it'll only get a few downloads.

 

You have a very very good point.

 

What is the actual definition of meshslapping? Given most mods start on the base of existing vanilla vehicles.