Mods System - Browse, Scan and Install

Where mods come from

Open the Mods tab and choose "Browse Marketplace". The row of provider tabs lists only the marketplaces that carry mods for your game and that the platform has credentials for, so what you see there is game-specific — Valheim, for example, offers Nexus Mods, Thunderstore and Hexium, while Windrose offers CurseForge and Nexus Mods. DayZ has one provider tab, Steam Workshop (DayZ’s own Workshop, app 221100), and no other.

CurseForge, Nexus Mods, Thunderstore, Modrinth, Hangar and Hexium can be searched and installed. Steam Workshop can be searched and installed wherever your game’s blueprint declares it, and that is what puts a Workshop tab on your Browse view: the platform downloads Workshop files through SteamCMD on the control plane and pushes them to your game host, so no Steam login is needed on the game host itself. Workshop install requires a linked Steam account on the platform (managed by an administrator from Ops → Steam Account). Where Workshop is not enabled for a game, results carry no Install button and a notice explains why. Every result also carries a "View" link to the mod’s own page.

Which providers a game gets is decided by that game’s blueprint, so the provider tabs on your own Browse view are the authority and no two games need carry the same row. 7 Days to Die and Enshrouded offer Nexus Mods; DayZ offers Steam Workshop; Minecraft Paper offers CurseForge, Nexus Mods, Modrinth and Hangar; Minecraft Fabric, Forge and NeoForge offer CurseForge, Nexus Mods and Modrinth; Palworld offers Steam Workshop, CurseForge and Nexus Mods; Valheim offers Nexus Mods, Thunderstore and Hexium; and Windrose offers CurseForge and Nexus Mods. Vanilla Minecraft has no marketplace at all. Each game’s own section of this knowledge base says which providers it gets, and whether Steam Workshop is one of them.

Mods that need other mods

Some mods only work when other mods are installed too. When you pick a file from Thunderstore, Modrinth or CurseForge and press Install, GameGrid first reads which other mods that mod needs. If any are missing from your server, a box lists them in the order they will go on, with the version the mod asks for where the marketplace gives one, and says which are already on your server. Confirm and they are installed first, one after another, then the mod you picked. Cancel and nothing is installed. As with any mod, they all load at the next start.

If a mod it needs cannot be found, or cannot be installed from the panel, GameGrid says which one and why, and nothing on your server is changed: install that mod yourself first, or choose another mod. If installing one of the needed mods fails part-way, the mod you picked is not installed, and the needed mods that went on before it stay installed (the message names them).

For Nexus Mods, Hangar, Steam Workshop and Hexium, GameGrid does not list the mods a mod needs, so read the mod’s own page for what else it requires. The mod loader a game needs (BepInEx on Valheim, for example) is not part of this list: the loader panel above the tabs installs it. A mod you upload yourself through the File Manager or over FTP is never checked.

Per-game support and mod loaders

Which game a mod is installed for is decided by the server’s own blueprint, never by anything the browser sends — so a Forge mod cannot be dropped onto a Paper server by editing a request. The same blueprint decides the folder each mod goes into: BepInEx/plugins for Valheim, Pal/Content/Paks/~mods for Palworld, R5/Content/Paks/~mods for Windrose, each Minecraft variant’s own plugin or mod folder, and for DayZ an @ folder of its own in the server’s directory.

Some games need a mod loader before any mod does anything. Where the blueprint declares one, a panel appears above the Installed/Browse tabs with its name, whether it is installed, and buttons to install, reinstall or uninstall it — BepInEx for Valheim, UE4SS for Windrose. Palworld's UE4SS is installed from its own Game Tools page instead; the Mods tab shows whether it is there and points you to it. A loader is injected when the game process starts, so installing or removing it only takes effect after a restart, and the panel says so.

A mod installed onto a server with no loader is listed as installed and does nothing in game. That is why the loader panel sits above the tabs rather than inside one of them.

DayZ needs no loader. Its server loads each @ folder named on its launch line — -mod= for a Client & server mod, -servermod= for a Server only mod — when it starts, and GameGrid builds that line from the Mods tab, so a mod added while the server runs is loaded from its next start. Mods on Your DayZ Server has the detail.

File Scanning

Every archive is scanned before it is installed, and a mod that fails is rejected rather than flagged — the install stops and the panel shows the reason and the pattern that matched. The scan looks for:

• Content matching a curated list of payloads that are never legitimate in a mod, whatever the game.
• Executable files in places that should only hold data.
• Size limits: 100 MB per file (2 GB for genuine large asset files such as textures and audio) and 4 GB for the whole mod.

The archive is also extracted with protection against zip-slip, zip bombs and symlink escapes, so a mod cannot write outside your server’s own directory.

There is no blocklist of known-bad mod hashes — the scan is behavioural, not reputational. Automated scanning cannot guarantee that third-party content is safe, compatible, or free from harmful behavior. Install mods from sources you trust, and read the mod’s own page and changelog first.

Load order, enabling and disabling

The Installed tab lists each mod with its name, version, where it came from, whether it is enabled, and its load-order number. Each mod has two controls: "Disable" (or "Enable"), which moves the mod’s files out of the loader directory, or back into it, without uninstalling anything, and "Remove", which deletes the mod. Load order is shown but cannot be edited from the page. While a Vault save is being loaded onto the server, installing or removing a mod is refused until the load has finished.

"Enabled" means the mod’s files are in place and not switched off; it is not the game loader’s verdict. On Valheim, the Installed tab also shows BepInEx’s own verdict beside Enabled: Loaded, Failed to load (with BepInEx’s reason under the card) or Not loaded. The labels come from BepInEx’s log of the server’s current start, or of its last start while it is stopped, and a mod that BepInEx does not name by the same name gets none. See the Valheim mods guide.

Reordering is a real operation, but today it is reachable through the Customer API (PUT .../mods/order), not from the Mods page. Enabling and disabling are also available through the API (PATCH .../mods/{id}) and the Discord bot (/mods toggle).

For most of the games here the order does not matter much anyway: BepInEx loads Valheim plugins alphabetically and resolves declared dependencies itself; Paper decides plugin order for Minecraft; 7 Days to Die takes order from each mod’s ModInfo.xml; and on Palworld, as on Windrose, .pak mods have no strict order at all.

DayZ is the exception. Its server loads mods in the order they are listed, a mod has to load after anything it depends on, and a DayZ server’s Installed tab has arrows on each mod to set that order; the new order is used from the next start.

Installing a Mod

Search on the Browse Marketplace tab, then press Install on the result you want. That opens a file picker rather than installing immediately: most mods publish several files, and this is where you choose which one. Each entry shows its category, version, size and description, and the file the author marked as the main download is badged "Primary".

On Modrinth the picker lists only the files built for the game version your server runs, whenever the mod has any. If it has none, every file is badged "Not for" your version and the picker warns you above the list: a file built for another version usually stops the server from starting. If your server's version could not be read, the picker says that instead, so check the version in each file's description before you install.

Some mods need more than one of those files — a Core plus a Resources archive, for example. The picker warns you when a mod looks like one of those; check the mod’s own page for its installation instructions and install each required file in turn.

Installing does not restart your server. Restart it from the status bar when you are done so the new files are loaded.

While an install, update or removal runs, a banner on the Mods page shows which step it is on. Until the job starts writing to your server, the banner has a "Cancel" button. Press it and the banner says "Stopping...": the job stops before anything is written to the server, and the banner then reads "Nothing on the server changed." A download that is already running is not interrupted; the job stops as soon as it finishes. Once the job has started writing to the server it can no longer be cancelled: it finishes, or fails and says what it left behind. Mods that were installed before you cancelled (the ones the mod needs) stay installed. The Customer API can read these jobs and cancel them too (GET /servers/{id}/mods/jobs, POST /servers/{id}/mods/jobs/{jobId}/cancel).

Keeping mods up to date

Mods are not updated automatically, and there is no per-mod version history to roll back to. When a mod you use publishes a new version, install it the same way you installed the first one.

DayZ works differently. A DayZ mod is marked Update available when the Steam Workshop has a newer version, and updating it is its own step, done while the server is stopped: Stop, Update the mod, then Start. A restart alone does not fetch the update, and a server still on the old version kicks players whose Steam has already updated the mod.

Take a backup on the Backups tab before changing mods on a world you care about. A mod that changes world data can make a save unreadable by the version of the modpack that wrote it, and the backup is the only way back.

The automatic game-update switch on the Admin tab updates the GAME, not your mods. A game update can leave a mod behind — if your server stops starting after one, remove the most recently updated mod first and check the Console tab.