Sandstorm 1.20 ModIO Changes/Troubleshooting

[peglegswansoon]

Hey guys, figured I should put something quick together for dealing with the latest Insurgency update.

As of game version 1.20, the game has switched to a newer version of the ModIO SDK/plugin. What does this mean for us as players? Ideally nothing as it should all have been taken care of behind the scenes... Unfortunately that's not the case, a few issues have come out. Here's how you can solve the common ones:

"My game now crashes on launch"
If your game crashes every time you start it with an error which looks like "PakFile was frozen with version FPakInfo::PakFile_Version_FrozenIndex, which is no longer supported", it means you may have some old/outdated mod files installed. To remove them:

• Go to "<game dir>\Insurgency\Mods\" and delete the "modio" folder. This is the old installation directory which isn't used anymore.

• Log in to the ModIO website using the same account you use for the game (usually your Steam account)

• At the top-left sidebar go to "My Library" > "Subscriptions" and unsubscribe from old mods. Or just unsubscribe from everything except EBS

• Go to "C:\Users\Public\mod.io\" and delete the "254" folder. This is the new mod installation directory. Deleting this clears any problematic mod files and cached data.

Start up the game again, hopefully it won't crash anymore and will begin to redownload your subscribed mods.


"I get stuck at 'Downloading Server Mods...' when I try to join our server"
The update introduced a new issue where the "auto-download server mods on join" feature doesn't always work properly.
The game no longer displays the download progress bar when downloading at that screen. You can manually check your system Task Manager for network/disk write activity which suggests the mods are downloading/installing still.
If you don't see any activity and you're not escaping that screen after a few seconds:

• Press Cancel to return to the menu

• Go to Mods, use the search bar top-left to search for EBS

• Subscribe to the EBS mod manually (or unsub and resub if you were already subscribed), let it download, then try rejoining the server

• If the mod does not download still, try restarting the game and joining again

• If it still doesn't work, close the game, go to "C:\Users\Public\mod.io\" and delete the "254" folder. Then go to "%localappdata%\mod.io\" and delete the "254" folder in there as well. Restart and try again.

Somewhat related to this is mod auto-updates. They don't seem to work properly either, so if a creator updates their mod it won't always be updated automatically on your client and can cause the same problem as above. If that happens to you, try the above steps again force the new version to install.


"My 'C:\' drive is filling up and running out of space"
Previously mods where stored inside the game's installation directory at <game dir>\Insurgency\Mods\modio\.
They are now stored in C:\Users\Public\mod.io\. Any mods for games which use ModIO will be stored here under the relevant "game id" subfolder (Sandstorm's is 254).This means that the install directory now defaults to your system drive which may cause issues for some people depending on your setup. You can override this using a configuration file if you want. You can change it globally for every game that uses ModIO on your system, or specifically for each game. To do this:

Global

• Start the game at least once after the 1.20 update. This will create the necessary metadata files. Close the game afterwards.

• Go to '%localappdata%\mod.io\' and open 'globalsettings.json' with a text editor

• You should see the "RootLocalStoragePath" option set there. Change the file path listed to whatever you want.

Next time you start the game it should now download mods under the new root directory.

Sandstorm Only

• Same steps as above, except the file you need to modify is '%localappdata%\mod.io\254\<your username>\user.json'

• You will need to add the 'RootLocalStoragePath' element manually as it won't be there by default.

Next time you start the game it should download Sandstorm mods specifically under the directory you set.

You can also delete the old mod installation directory to save some space as it's no longer used. The old files cannot be easily transferred to the new location as the structure is different, so to avoid issues it's probably easier to just let the game download them again.

"When I check my mod subscriptions, I have loads of stuff in there I didn't subscribe to. What gives?"
The new version changed how "server mods" are handled. Previously, if you joined a server running a mod you didn't have, the game would download and install that mod as a one-off without subscribing you to that mod. The mod files would stick around on your system but would only be loaded again if you joined a server running it.

This has now changed. When you join a server running mods you will be automatically subscribed to all of the mods that server is running. There's no easy workaround for this, but you can now choose to manually unsubscribe from those mods which should also delete the files for you too.

Any other problems reach out to me on Discord an I can try to help! And any other suggestions you have feel free to drop them here