I'm going to preface this by saying that this post is, in my opinion, fundamentally different than IMB11's post earlier today. If you are a player, this post will hopefully shed light on why custom mods and maps will decrease in frequency going forward. If you are a modder, or considering getting into modding, this post is meant to inform you of things you may not be aware of and that may impact your decision to make mods for this game.

For those of you that don't know me, I am a very active member of the modding community, and have been since very early on. Some of you may know me as the person that made the US Demand Generator (used to make every custom US map), or Depot (used to make the majority of all current custom maps), or Missed Connections, or one of the many maps I have created for SB (a bunch of maps across the US, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Norway, and Finland). I hope that lends some credibility to what I am writing here.

Missed Connections is sort of the catalyst for this post and what I will initially be focusing on, but I want to be clear that this has been brewing behind the scenes for other reasons. I am going to lay out a brief timeline to set the stage for why I will no longer be supporting the modding community:

1. When I joined the SB community in October of last year, people were already asking the devs for a more informative error message besides "No valid path found between station tracks". This most commonly happens because either (a) no crossovers, or (b) there is a break in the tracks. (a) is easy to identify and fix, but the real issue is (b), because you had to zoom in and slowly go through all the tracks to find the break (very time consuming and annoying) or delete the tracks and start over (also time consuming, and costs a lot if you're not in sandbox mode).

2. A few months later, EJ gave us the initial modding API. It had issues of course, but it was a great start. He took our feedback seriously and worked with us to get the bare minimum that we needed to turn our until-then shoddy modding approach into a real-deal modding system with hooks in the game and all. It was a nice development.

3. Months came and went, all the while players continued to request a solution to identify breaks in tracks. Some players, like YellowAquarium, dedicated hours of their life to review players' save files and help them identify the breaks. Players continued asking for a feature to address this and were ignored.

4. The Steam release was on the horizon, and I thought surely the devs would fix this problem. It's an hour, two hours tops to implement the fix, and it would be a huge QOL improvement. Players were regularly asking for this. Still, no fix from the devs.

5. The Steam release was imminent, and there was still no fix for this problem. In a moment of "fine, I'll do it myself", I spent a couple hours one night to create Missed Connections. The community response was immediate, and it was regarded as a Great Thing, something that should be part of the base game. I concur with that sentiment.

6. A little over two weeks later, beta version 1.5.6 is released. In the patch notes, I see the following:

Game shows missed connections in construction and route editing mode

Interesting. Sounds like my mod? A few members of the community pointed that out to colin, who then went back and updated the patch notes to the following:

Game shows missed connections in construction and route editing mode (thx @slurry for the idea)

The timeline is interesting. Almost a year goes by of players constantly asking for this feature, and it only gets implemented right after I finally do it? I mean, great, it should have always been a base game feature, but the timing is odd, especially considering how fast it is to implement this feature. Now, I'm not accusing colin of plagiarizing my mod. If he did, his implementation would have actually functioned correctly from the beginning and would have been more user-friendly, but it still isn't quite there days after its release. The problem here is that

1. There was zero communication about this. In a big studio game, obviously comms between devs and modders would rarely happen - but SB isn't a big studio game, the devs frequently interact with the players on Discord, and there are channels set up to better facilitate communication between the devs and the modding community. I don't expect the devs to ask my permission to implement my mod's functionality into the base game - it's their game, they can do what they want - but at the minimum I expect them to at least tell me it was going to happen so that I could stop spending my time working on it. "Hey, your mod is really helpful, we're going to add something like that to the base game." That takes, what, 30 seconds? and saves me from wasting more time on a mod that would soon be obsolete. Colin has countless channels to get in contact with me, between DMs, the main SB server, and the SBM server. None of these were utilized.

2. While colin maintains that he independently implemented the feature, he named it exactly the same thing as my mod. Coupled with the timeline of things, that raises eyebrows, and gives me reason to question whether it was actually independently developed like he says. Of course, that can't be proven one way or the other, so I don't really care to spend much time thinking about that.

3. Finally, and I think this is the biggest factor here, given that mods one day pop up in the beta as a base game feature (this has also started happening to other mods, like Steno's AA), it really begs the question - why should we spend our time developing mods when the devs will end up adopting it into the base game with at best a "thanks for the idea" in the patch notes? Developing a larger mod, like Steno's AA, requires many hours of effort - conceiving the idea, implementing it, optimizing it, getting community feedback and adding requested features, etc. The devs can then show up, take the final result, and code that into the game in a fraction of the time that it would normally take them to do. Some developers actually reward their modders for this, but with SB being a small team, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that here. That's not why we make mods for this game.

I attempted to have a conversation with colin to get some clarity about what delineation we should expect between base game vs. modding in an attempt to better understand what sort of mods we can work on where it won't get scooped out from under us and put into the base game. If we're going to spend hours of our life making something, we'd like to put that that into something that we can continue working on without competing with the devs - it's a waste of our time to work on something the devs are going to do when there is no compensation tied to it.

I'm not going to share the DMs because I think that is cringe (unless colin wants that to happen, anyway), but the takeaway from that conversation (If one can call it that? It did not feel like one), which I had to piece together on my own since colin would not actually answer my questions, is that every modder should expect the devs will scoop their mods and put it into the base game. We are an idea board for them to pull from for base game mechanics - free R&D for them. There will be no clarity on what topics they won't work on, and all mod development is done with the expectation that it might be a massive waste of your time. This is in stark contrast to the modding communities for most games (Minecraft, all Paradox titles, Valheim, etc.), where the devs rarely adopt mods into the base game, provide clear attribution to the modders, and in many cases actually hired modders to work on the game (EU4 modders hired to work on content for EU4, and then brought on to develop EU5). Other games like Cities Skylines more frequently adopt mods into the base game, but they do so with clear communication with the modders, spotlight their work, and provide clear attribution to them. The features don't suddenly appear in the game without attribution where the modders had no prior knowledge it was going to happen.

So with that in mind, as much as I have enjoyed the hundreds of hours I have put into modding SB, I cannot come up with any reason why I should continue working on mods for this game. If the devs want to put up a wall and not have open and clear conversations with the modding community so that we can ensure our time is not wasted, that is their choice. At the same time, not producing new mods is also our choice. There are multiple fully functioning mods that are ready for release, but they will never see the light of day as a result of this. A fully dynamic demand simulation that varies throughout the calendar year with a half-working system for third-place trips (another highly requested feature since I first joined the community last year), multiplayer, VR, the list goes on. Unfortunately, players will need to wait on the devs to implement these mechanics on their own, if they ever do.

I hope that this post is informative for the community. Best of luck to you all.