The Kerbal Player's Guide

Chapter 11. Utility Mods

In this chapter, we’ll be looking at some mods that add some specific utility or function to your game. Whether it’s automatically notifying you when your scientific experiments are ready to activate, having better control over the systems on board your rocket, or even automatically flying entire craft, there’s a mod ready for your use.

Action Groups Extended

Out of the box, KSP suports 10 action groups, allowing you to activate parts at the click of a button. This can be a great time-saver and becomes almost essential for more complex craft or when actions need to be coordinated. However, action groups have to be set up when the craft is designed, and if you need more than 10 actions, you’re out of luck.

Diazo’s Action Groups Extended (AGExt) greatly expands the action group system, allowing for over 250 action groups to be defined, along with user-defined hotkeys, in-flight reassignment, toggle buttons, labels, and easier part selection. To install AGExt, run this command in your terminal:

ckan install AGExt

AGExt also plays nicely with other mods, allowing you to activate groups from kOS scripts, triggers from smart parts, preflight settings from auto actions, or recognizing and respecting the signal delay from the RemoteTech mod (see “RemoteTech”). AGExt is useful right from the very start when you’re playing in Career mode. Even though the first-level buildings don’t allow for action groups, they do allow for triggers to be set on the Abort, Brakes, ...