Wabbajack
An automated Modlist Installer
Wabbajack can reproduce an entire modding setup on another machine without bundling any assets or re-distributing any mods.
Terminology:
MODPACK
Commonly found in the Minecraft modding scene, a modpack is a collection of mods put together in a single file. Often compressed into a zip, 7z or rar archive. This single file contains an entire modding setup and is very large in size as every file from every mod is included. Uploading a Modpack to the Internet means distributing possible copyrighted content and has lead to huge backlash in other modding scenes.
MODLIST (WRITTEN GUIDE)
A written guide like STEP, Lexys LOTD SE Mod Guide or The Phoenix Flavour tell the user what, when and how to download and install. In order to reproduce the same setup of the guide author you will pick up a lot of new modding tricks and learn something unknown to you before. Depending on the depth of the guide, process not only takes a very long time but is very error prone if the user does not read everything carefully.
MODLIST (WABBAJACK)
A Wabbajack Modlist can be compared to a written guide except it is not written for humans but for machines. The resulting .wabbajack file contains instructions on what, when and how to download and install in order to replicate the entire setup of the author without bundling any assets.
How Wabbajack works:
COMPILATION
To compile a Modlist, Wabbajack needs a lot of information and has to know from where every file came from. We start by indexing everything: your game, downloads and installation folder and create a VFS cache file containing the location and xxHash of every indexed file.
After WJ indexed all files and done some pre-validating of the archives, we run every file through a Compilation Stack. This stack contains Compilation Steps that find out from where a file came from. It starts at the top and falls through until one step assigns the file a reason to exist and origin. Some steps simply ignore files like logs, caches or crash dumbs while other deconstruct BSAs, include zEdit patches, patch the game ESMs or re-target paths in config files.
The Compilation Stack is the meat of the entire process and will result in a list of directives that will later be saved in the output file. If one file dropped out of the stack it will have no match and the compilation will fail.
The last steps during compilation are all about verifying whether or not the archive is still downloadable, if the zEdit merges are valid and if the user can actually install the modlist.
INSTALLATION
Wabbajack is made to be a one click installer: You start the application, load the Modlist and hit Install.
We start, same as the Compilation, by hashing every file to find out if certain archives are already present. This means that you can close Wabbajack at any time and return to the installation when you got the time as the program will find what needs to be downloaded or installed.
Wabbajack can download from a multitude of different websites including, but not limited to, Nexus Mods, GitHub, MEGA, MediaFire, GDrive, Dropbox, AFKMods, BethesdaNet, DeadlyStream, LoversLab, ModDB, Steam Workshop, TESAlliance, VectorPlexus, ENBSeries and more!
After downloading, Wabbajack starts going through all Directives within the Modlist and installs the files according to the instructions of those Directives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUOTTzBkLwA
Har använt det själv till SkyrimVR jag lägger till egna mods också
