What's mods stability on dedicated servers actually?

I remember that more than half year ago and also earlier than that implementing a new patch released by Funcom onto your modded dedicated server could cause some really serious issues like:

  1. All building parts or workstations from a mod got wiped in the result - it means that players who had modded houses could loose all of their belongings in a blink of an eye without warning.

  2. Steam forced you to update your game, the update process was not skippable. In this case:

  3. If you as an admin updated your dedicated server then all modded buildings or workstations etc. on it got wiped. On the other hand if you didn’t update your dedicated server in hope to wait for modders to update their mod, players could not join it due to them having newer versions than the one on your server.

  4. Players also couldn’t downgrade their game version to fit your dedicated server’s version.

  5. In this scenario server becames inaccessible until the author of the mod updates it, and you can’t say it for sure if he updates it within 7 hours or within 7 days - maybe he can’t either.

  6. Every hour that server is inaccessible for more than 1 day it starts loosing players and every time it happens it looses player’s trust.

So:

-Is it still a thing or is it fixed now?

-How stable and how safe from wiping is the modded content now?

It happened to me once allready that my whole house and literally everything disappeared after game update because the update somehow interfered with mod’s content (most of my house parts unfortunatelly), it also happened to me with another mod that after the update started to cause critical errors so i’ve had to delete it. Both these mods feelt to be trustworthy by being minimalistic / not complicated. You think that i could i be making up this story ? Why would i do that ?

How can you know if the mod is about to break? It doesn’t break in 10 updates in a row and then boom.
But is it even possible to say upfront if the mod will be stable or not?

allright, but “the engine that is running the machine” also plays a significant role. For example have you seen apple software from old times? It was almost unbreakable and very well designed for the user.

Nobody can be master of all trades. The most stable is pure vanilla. The server besides being stable also should be FUN and here is where the mods comes in.

Most people who are starting their own servers just want’s something more than vanille.

Well, the point that i got to feel bad about right now is that: what if i try the best of my possibilities to make server stable AND fun and the same, but funcom gives me a very poor tools to do so. I would really like to give people very fine gaming experience, it’s feels sad to think that funcom doesn’t care about admins hard work like mine.

I hope that you understood my first post well where i pointed out that conflict between mods and the way that game updates itself.

oh and ofc thank you very much for your answers !

This only happens if you start up a server without a mod installed on a server where the mod was installed and people built stuff with it. What probably happened here is the server owner couldn’t get the server to start with a mod that wasn’t updated yet and took the mod off.

Taking a mod off removes all pieces structures tied to the mod but items in inventories should simply become black squares and would return once the mod is added back in (assuming players don’t throw them out). The reason this doesn’t work with building pieces is without a reference, stability does its thing and removes them.

Technically it never had to be a thing. And there’s nothing to fix.

This depends on the server owner and the authors of the mods being used.

So to explain this further. If the following steps happen, you should have no issues, and this has always been true of modding servers in this game:

  1. When the game updates. Shut down server.
  2. Backup your server’s database.
  3. Update server to new game version.
  4. Wait for critical mods to update.
  5. Update mods.
  6. Start up server.

Follow those steps in order. Waiting for mods to update is where many people got and still and will always get hemmed up on. You HAVE to be patient. Modders are human. They don’t aways get their mods updated immediately. This means in the case of major updates you may have to wait for days or even up to a week in some cases before bringing the server back online. This is the price you agreed to pay when modding a server.

In rare cases. Mods sometimes have authors who move on, and do not update their mods anymore. Sometimes updates will break these and they will never have a fix. If this happens, then yes during these updates you will lose all modded content from that mod. That is simply a fact of life.

Funcom has absolutely NO obligation to ensure mods stay compatible with the game months after their modders abandon their own content. We as server admins agree with this when we mod our servers.

Anytime a server loses buildings from updates because of mods, that is usually the fault of the server owner not backing up their servers and not updating their servers properly. Or in some rare cases mods not being maintained anymore. Not Funcom. Conan Exiles is their game, and they can update it in the manner of their choosing.

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Thanks for your response.

Well, actually it could be “fixed”, if conan had a game engine separated from servers list to log in. Then player and server owner could decide what version they are operating on. OR/AND if steam would not force the update in an instant, i mean that steam would have few latest versions that he tolerates.

In this case the server owner would not need to wait for modder to update his (problematic) mod. Both players and admin would be able to install every patch manually.

Thank you very much for such complexed and precise answer, i really appreciate this. And you reminded me that i could make use of changing the times of daily auto-backup.

Anyway, you know what? Funcom should give some warnings about the mods influence and stability for the servers. I mean they really should do.

You know, choosing version that you can operate on could AT least give admin and players time to save their belonging from harm freely.

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