What Mods Actually Fix, Counted Across Twenty-Six Games

Mod listings are almost always ordered by download count, which tells you what is popular and nothing about what is wrong. This survey sorts differently. Every mod in the file was installed, run for at least twenty minutes, and filed under the single problem it primarily addresses.

That last constraint is doing a lot of work and it is the survey's main weakness. A texture pack that also replaces illegible icons is filed as interface repair, because that is what it primarily achieves, and a reasonable person could file it elsewhere. Where a judgement was close it is noted in the per-game notes.

The distribution

Read the fourth column rather than the third. Interface repair appears in twenty-three of twenty-six games, which means it is not a property of a few badly made products — it is close to universal.

Interface repair, broken down further

One hundred and forty-seven mods is too coarse a number to be useful, so the category was subdivided during the fourteenth game.

Not one of these is a hard technical problem. They are all problems of attention: features that a team under deadline pressure will cut because the game still functions without them, and which the first fifty hours of play make intolerable.

Two conclusions that reversed

At fifteen games this survey said that accessibility work was the smallest category because few games need it. That was wrong, and it reversed when the sixteenth game entered the file — a title with no text scaling, no colourblind provision and no remappable controls, which alone contributed nine of the current twenty-one accessibility mods.

The corrected statement: accessibility is the smallest category because it is the work least often attempted, not the work least often needed. Where a game is bad enough, somebody does it, and where a game is merely mediocre nobody does.

The second reversal concerned new content. At fifteen games it looked like the second-largest category. It is now fourth, and the reason is that the city builder in this ledger contributes six hundred content mods on its own and was excluded from the main distribution as an outlier — an exclusion that is arguable and is stated here so that anybody who disagrees can add it back.

Thirty-six per cent of the community work in this file is people rebuilding menus. Not extending the game, not rebalancing it — rebuilding screens that shipped in a state their own players found unusable.

The one strong correlation

Games with a high interface-repair count have a wide gap between their two scores, and the relationship is close to linear across the twenty-six. A game with more than eight interface mods has an average gap of +1.9; a game with fewer than three averages +0.6.

This is the least surprising finding here and the most useful. Menus are cheap to fix and enormously improve how a game feels to play, which means a wide gap in this ledger is usually not evidence of a broken game — it is evidence of an unfinished one.

What is not counted

Three exclusions, all of which shrink the totals. Cosmetic-only mods with no functional change are omitted, which removes several thousand items. Mods that had not been updated in eighteen months and no longer load are omitted. And mods for the racing game in this ledger are omitted for the obvious reason that none exist.