The Kerbal Player's Guide

Chapter 10. Introduction to Mods

Kerbal Space Program by itself is a fascinating and engrossing game, but you may have had times when you wish there were features that simply weren’t there—such as more action groups; a tool to help calculate the delta-v of each stage; or more realism for things like reentry, life support, or communications.

Luckily, KSP has a vibrant and active modding community, and many of the most wanted features have been implemented with mods. In fact, many of the game’s core features—including resource mining, and many parts and contracts—were once community-provided mods that have since been integrated into the base game. Mods can greatly increase the depth of the game, by expanding extraplanetary resource collection, future technologies, or mapping and communication features so that satellites become truly useful.

In this chapter, we’ll cover some of the best mods KSP has to offer, how to install and manage them, and even how to write your own.

Note

In this part, you’ll see the word stock appear quite often. Stock simply means the unmodified version of KSP—that is, KSP just after you’ve downloaded and installed it. Up until this part, we haven’t been using any mods at all.

Installing Mods Using the CKAN

In the dark ages, mods for Kerbal Space Program had to be installed by hand. Players needed to ensure their mod was compiled for the game version they were using, had any required dependencies, and did not conflict with other mods installed. Chaos ruled ...