⚙️Modding | Repacking

In DayZ, people often misunderstand the point of modding and I have come across many situations where people tend to repack the mods instead of simple modding or making an overrides.

The point of modding is to modify the current functionality in the game or a mod from the workshop.

Repacking is when you take the mod and pack it to your other mod which can be beneficial but also it has many cons people are not aware of.

I would like to help you understand better the point of making overrides and modding in general and reason why it's a good practice to write your own override before trying to repack.

Not only you keep the original mod functional and referenced to its original author, but you are also keeping the original mod updated so you don't have to care about potential update on the workshop and repacking it again and again. And most importantly, you safe the space.

People often say, that repacks safe the performance. This can be true in many cases because you're loading just a packed pbo into the memory and don't have to load multiple at once but in the final state, it's almost the same as if you would load up the multiple mods because you are loading the same scripts as it would be split into several pbo, apart from the headers and some crucial meta files from the mod itself. It's a very speculative topic and it is understandable that people want to have less mods visible in the server browser and more consistent setup in terms of their mod structure and stuff.

But most of the server owners and people who are just using the mods are not aware of simple fact, that you're basically reusing the same data as there are already uploaded on the workshop and downloaded by other clients.

Let's say you are repacking a huge mod with models and textures which has gigabites of data. When you repack this mod, you're making a copy of the mod on the workshop with different id and basically consume another same amount of space on the steam servers, which doesn't have to be your business as you think. But let's imagine that there would be repack for the whole SNAFU mod on each server you want to play.

Whenever you would try to play on a different server, you would need to download the same amount of data again and again just because the server has it's own repacked version.

You would have 20 favorite servers you are playing and you would need to download 20x~3GB of mod just to be able to play on those servers. That's already a 60GB of data because people are lazy and think that repacks brings benefits for them. Not only they hide & lie that they are using the SNAFU mod, they will just consume additional space on the peoples machines and more space on the cloud storage. In general it's a big dummy move and that's the reason I would like to explain how to make overrides and do the modding in a more reasonable way.