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 and Thunderstore, while Windrose offers CurseForge and Nexus Mods.

CurseForge, Nexus Mods, Thunderstore, Modrinth, and Hangar can be searched and installed. Steam Workshop can be searched and installed for Palworld: 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). For games where Workshop is not enabled, 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: Minecraft Paper offers Hangar, CurseForge, Modrinth and Nexus Mods; the Fabric, Forge and NeoForge variants offer CurseForge, Modrinth and Nexus Mods; Palworld offers Nexus Mods, CurseForge and Steam Workshop; Valheim offers Thunderstore and Nexus Mods; Windrose offers CurseForge and Nexus Mods; and 7 Days to Die offers Nexus Mods. Vanilla Minecraft has no marketplace, and Steam Workshop is offered on Palworld alone.

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, and each Minecraft variant’s own plugin or mod folder.

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 Palworld and Windrose. 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.

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.

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 .pak mods for Palworld and Windrose have no strict order at all.

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".

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.

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.

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.