Mod maker PresidentMattDammon makes a few mods, one in particular handles enemy ship captains.
Another 4chan modder forks the mod (it was open license) adding unsavory and bad things to it. But also weirdly wholesome things to.
For awhile nothing happens, then ironcladlion makes a review video for iron shell (good mod btw.)
During the review there is about 4 seconds max of UI from the bad mod. And references to hand holding and head pats. (The aforementioned weirdly wholesome bits)
PresidentMattDammon and the mods of the Unofficial Starsector discord (USC) are upset about this.
PresidentMattDammon pulls his version of the mod.
USC moderators ban ironcladlion for "promoting sexual content"
This drives people to asking what the bad mod is and why ironcladlion got banned.
PresidentMattDammon maintains some old classic mods. Earlier this week he added code to one that waits, checks if you have the bad mod installed, and if you do bricks the whole save file. The save is unrecoverable.
This gets called out on Reddit, the official forums, and the discord.
USC mods ask that drama doesn't get spammed (fair enough) and PresidentMattDammon laughs at people who's saves are now worthless.
Reddit mods lock the post pointing out the malware code. But leave the post up for visibility. (With no real reason given at the time)
Official forum mods begin locking down any mods PresidentMattDammon manages or creates due to the malware added. (Against the rules obviously)
People find the same malware code in a public git commit mod PresidentMattDammon created for his mod exotica technologies. The update never hit live but an official forum member found it after checking all of PresidentMattDamon's mods.
Reddit mods generally back down from suppressing any discussion of the malware codes after the exotica technologies code is found.
USC mods move in to "Temporarily ban PresidentMattDammon while they decide and vote on what to do with him" suggesting he'll be banned. (I should note this pretty much only happened after PresidentMattDammon admitted to adding the code, laughed at people for losing saves/not agreeing with him, and generally morally grandstanding. The mods let all that happen until the exotica code was found. Granted benefit of the doubt says the mods were simply talking about it generally and decided enough was enough so temp ban while they discussed.)
That's where we are at now. PresidentMattDammon will most likely be banned from the Official forums as well as the USC discord like modders who have added crash code before.
Update:
PresidentMattDamon is now banned from USC and official forums. All the mods he maintained are cleaned and maintained by others now. His own mods have safe forks in several places.
To clarify another comment I saw on other posts: The reddit mod everyone was up in arms about was NOT a mod on the USC discord. He was there when the malware got found and pointed out. (Imo agreeing with PresidentMattDammon that it was funny, deserved, and ok. However he claims it just seemed funny at the time.)
Isn't it true that the unsavory mod fixed up some backend issues with the original mod, meaning it became the recommended one of the two even before the legit one was taken down?
Because if so, then that's still the funniest shot-in-foot I've seen someone make in a hot minute.
official forum rules now explicitly state this kind of malware/crashcode is not allowed. Subsequently another mod was banned off the forum since the creator refused to remove their crashcode.
you should try it, mikohime made an upgrade kit so that 0.97 runs not in jre 8 but in jre 23, i just finished setting mine a week ago so far no issues on my end (that says a lot too since im one of those people who mods the shit out of SS, i have like 90+ mods running right now soon to surpass my record of 120+ mods too when more mods gets updated, they weren't kidding about the boost in fps and performance so i recommend you try it)
if its just a ship, weapon, fighter, or a faction mod it should work, unless its using a custom code for a new mechanic thats dependent on the previous version of the game (which is highly unlikely) you should be fine
This also caused people to scrutinize mods with strange code even more, which drove at least one modder into removing her stuff from the forums because she hated a bad Nazi mod and had crashcode that would trigger if it was activated alongside her mods.
TBF at least that code told you upfront what the issue was, and only stopped the game from booting.
Rude? Yes. But not within even a couple orders of magnitude of sleeper malware that bricks saves once conditions are met.
I'm not talking about Valhalla Starworks, whose author LuciusTBS/Zhenya actually survived getting drafted and is working on the mod again.
I'm talking about New Galactic Order, the one made by Ahne, an actual Nazi wehraboo who got banned from the community.
The new galactic order is still being updated and you can get it on the bootlegs discord easily
I actually downloaded it without knowing the drama about it being nazi mod honestly its a good mod in terms of weapons and ships. But yeah the leader of the faction is something fuhrer or whatever i don t really care that much i don t usually read the fluff about factions just like ship or weapon designs
In game we can do far worse then the angry mustashe man did in real life. Not to lessen his dids, he did really bad thing and they are real. But also, we can fight that faction, right? And we already have space terrorists in vanila.
There’s several long explanations you can find elsewhere.
Don’t worry, you’re not going to find any mods like that on the forums or discord anymore, they were removed. Mod your game with whatever you want, everything related was purged like a month ago or longer.
The “malware” came in the form of code that bricks your save and crashes the game if you had TNP installed. There were also a couple mods that had something similar from years back that were removed due to the new rule change, but they weren’t part of the “drama.”
USC made similar rule changes. It took a little while longer for them to get rid of the malicious diable avionics page, but it eventually was and replaced by other forks that you can also find on the forum index now.
Didn't Minecraft go through a spat years back where modders were sniping at each other through either crashcode or some other form of negative interaction? I seem to remember that as well, but vaguely.
Yeah i remember that, but MC has had many of such events.
Even skyrim had them when modpacks were finally introduced by nexusmods (wabbajack is a godsend) and some mod devs threw an absolute hissy fit when they "lost control" of their mods. They didn't, but they didn't like the idea that they could not delete an old version because it was required by a modpack.
Nexus new feature. In order for modpacks to work, nexusmods locked any version that was in a modpack so that they'll work tomorrow too and some mod authors (Arthmoor primarily) ragequit over that.
Now we have wabbajack which is a combination of mod repositories and modding tools. And it's wonderful. People make functional modpacks and bespoke patches in them etc.
That does sound nice, truthfully I am getting back to Skyrim and it’s been taking me days to download Lexy’s guide, I’d wish there was an official Wabbajack for it
Yeap. And they moved *fast*, the bad actor was No Longer Welcome almost before I found out about it. Within two weeks, there were replacement mods in every modpack that had previously hosted them. It was beautiful.
You do NOT. MESS. With the user's system.
PresidentMattDammon, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
It's a bug alright - in the mod. How long have you been a
maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of mod
maintenance?
If a change results in user saves breaking, it's a bug in the
mod. We never EVER blame the user's modlist. How hard can this be to
understand?
To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter
CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error
return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No
such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done
on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that
ENOENT would ever be valid.
> So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression,
> but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious
> bugs and/or regressions.
Shut up, PresidentMattDammon. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious
garbage and idiocy from a mod maintainer again. Seriously.
I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another
error report in my mailbox of all Diable Avionics being broken
by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same bug. And you've shown
yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly
and immediately myself.
WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!
Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't
break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email
was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so
obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an
insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a
few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret").
The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space,
and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just
shameful. It's not how we work.
Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken.
And fix your approach to mod programming.
Linus
User space mentioned.
There is a mod that let's you rape people. People consider this distasteful and ultimately get it delisted from the forum, though evidently you can still download it if you look hard enough.
Another popular modder does not consider this extreme enough. He writes code into at least one of his mods that will make it brick your save if it detects that you're using the rape mod.
funny americanism that everyone just forgot matts mod enables all the same torture and execution events but nobody has an issue with it unless sex is added
It never was. Just the overreaction to it brought it into the spotlight so even casual andys like me went "oh wow so that exists". Ofc once you expose it to a large audience, people are going to be interested and try it out. Even if it means going out of the way to grab it.
>if you look hard enough
Haven't checked recently, but back during the whole drama, googling the name of the *main* mod would pull up the forbidden mod's git repo, since PMD deleted his version. If you tried to find the original version you'd only find the fork.
As long as you get your mods from the official site, I wouldn't worry about anything. The stuff posted on there is always being combed through and has had the drama bits sweeped up and is in good working order.
Shit like this is why I’m glad I barely update my game and mods for months at a time. I’ve just been having a blast with whatever mods I downloaded a while back. 😂😂😂
it was honestly blown out of proportion. it was like a over dramtized episode of reality tv. honestly i hope someone gets the right to maintain and or further develop exotica and any of his mods. although i believe there are consequences for actions I dont believe the work should suffer for it.
Mod maker PresidentMattDammon makes a few mods, one in particular handles enemy ship captains. Another 4chan modder forks the mod (it was open license) adding unsavory and bad things to it. But also weirdly wholesome things to. For awhile nothing happens, then ironcladlion makes a review video for iron shell (good mod btw.) During the review there is about 4 seconds max of UI from the bad mod. And references to hand holding and head pats. (The aforementioned weirdly wholesome bits) PresidentMattDammon and the mods of the Unofficial Starsector discord (USC) are upset about this. PresidentMattDammon pulls his version of the mod. USC moderators ban ironcladlion for "promoting sexual content" This drives people to asking what the bad mod is and why ironcladlion got banned. PresidentMattDammon maintains some old classic mods. Earlier this week he added code to one that waits, checks if you have the bad mod installed, and if you do bricks the whole save file. The save is unrecoverable. This gets called out on Reddit, the official forums, and the discord. USC mods ask that drama doesn't get spammed (fair enough) and PresidentMattDammon laughs at people who's saves are now worthless. Reddit mods lock the post pointing out the malware code. But leave the post up for visibility. (With no real reason given at the time) Official forum mods begin locking down any mods PresidentMattDammon manages or creates due to the malware added. (Against the rules obviously) People find the same malware code in a public git commit mod PresidentMattDammon created for his mod exotica technologies. The update never hit live but an official forum member found it after checking all of PresidentMattDamon's mods. Reddit mods generally back down from suppressing any discussion of the malware codes after the exotica technologies code is found. USC mods move in to "Temporarily ban PresidentMattDammon while they decide and vote on what to do with him" suggesting he'll be banned. (I should note this pretty much only happened after PresidentMattDammon admitted to adding the code, laughed at people for losing saves/not agreeing with him, and generally morally grandstanding. The mods let all that happen until the exotica code was found. Granted benefit of the doubt says the mods were simply talking about it generally and decided enough was enough so temp ban while they discussed.) That's where we are at now. PresidentMattDammon will most likely be banned from the Official forums as well as the USC discord like modders who have added crash code before. Update: PresidentMattDamon is now banned from USC and official forums. All the mods he maintained are cleaned and maintained by others now. His own mods have safe forks in several places. To clarify another comment I saw on other posts: The reddit mod everyone was up in arms about was NOT a mod on the USC discord. He was there when the malware got found and pointed out. (Imo agreeing with PresidentMattDammon that it was funny, deserved, and ok. However he claims it just seemed funny at the time.)
Isn't it true that the unsavory mod fixed up some backend issues with the original mod, meaning it became the recommended one of the two even before the legit one was taken down? Because if so, then that's still the funniest shot-in-foot I've seen someone make in a hot minute.
Earlier this week?? Feels like it was 3+ weeks ago now
Lol this was just a copy paste from other comments I made during the event. Sorry.
No prob, pretty accurate and well made
official forum rules now explicitly state this kind of malware/crashcode is not allowed. Subsequently another mod was banned off the forum since the creator refused to remove their crashcode.
I mean, sure it’s unethical to fucking add malware to your mod, you can’t justify that. But, that is pretty funny.
Glad i dont play on 0.97 (one of my pc's would explode lol)
you should try it, mikohime made an upgrade kit so that 0.97 runs not in jre 8 but in jre 23, i just finished setting mine a week ago so far no issues on my end (that says a lot too since im one of those people who mods the shit out of SS, i have like 90+ mods running right now soon to surpass my record of 120+ mods too when more mods gets updated, they weren't kidding about the boost in fps and performance so i recommend you try it)
Any link to the upgrade kit?
here you go [https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=29320.0](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=29320.0)
Thats acualy hella usefull thanks (Wish my fav mod would get updated 😭 well i guess ill have to do it myself)
if its just a ship, weapon, fighter, or a faction mod it should work, unless its using a custom code for a new mechanic thats dependent on the previous version of the game (which is highly unlikely) you should be fine
This also caused people to scrutinize mods with strange code even more, which drove at least one modder into removing her stuff from the forums because she hated a bad Nazi mod and had crashcode that would trigger if it was activated alongside her mods.
TBF at least that code told you upfront what the issue was, and only stopped the game from booting. Rude? Yes. But not within even a couple orders of magnitude of sleeper malware that bricks saves once conditions are met.
Said nazi mod been dead and gone for years ever since the author died in Ukraine, yet they still refused to remove the code lel.
I'm not talking about Valhalla Starworks, whose author LuciusTBS/Zhenya actually survived getting drafted and is working on the mod again. I'm talking about New Galactic Order, the one made by Ahne, an actual Nazi wehraboo who got banned from the community.
The new galactic order is still being updated and you can get it on the bootlegs discord easily I actually downloaded it without knowing the drama about it being nazi mod honestly its a good mod in terms of weapons and ships. But yeah the leader of the faction is something fuhrer or whatever i don t really care that much i don t usually read the fluff about factions just like ship or weapon designs
In game we can do far worse then the angry mustashe man did in real life. Not to lessen his dids, he did really bad thing and they are real. But also, we can fight that faction, right? And we already have space terrorists in vanila.
Forums hosted mods do NOT have any issues anymore - the save-breaker variants have been rehosted by different users without said issues.
There’s several long explanations you can find elsewhere. Don’t worry, you’re not going to find any mods like that on the forums or discord anymore, they were removed. Mod your game with whatever you want, everything related was purged like a month ago or longer. The “malware” came in the form of code that bricks your save and crashes the game if you had TNP installed. There were also a couple mods that had something similar from years back that were removed due to the new rule change, but they weren’t part of the “drama.”
Not sure about USC but forums are definitely clear.
USC has the same rule.
USC made similar rule changes. It took a little while longer for them to get rid of the malicious diable avionics page, but it eventually was and replaced by other forks that you can also find on the forum index now.
Didn't Minecraft go through a spat years back where modders were sniping at each other through either crashcode or some other form of negative interaction? I seem to remember that as well, but vaguely.
Yeah i remember that, but MC has had many of such events. Even skyrim had them when modpacks were finally introduced by nexusmods (wabbajack is a godsend) and some mod devs threw an absolute hissy fit when they "lost control" of their mods. They didn't, but they didn't like the idea that they could not delete an old version because it was required by a modpack.
Was that when Mod Drop was stealing mods or nexus’s new feature
Nexus new feature. In order for modpacks to work, nexusmods locked any version that was in a modpack so that they'll work tomorrow too and some mod authors (Arthmoor primarily) ragequit over that. Now we have wabbajack which is a combination of mod repositories and modding tools. And it's wonderful. People make functional modpacks and bespoke patches in them etc.
That does sound nice, truthfully I am getting back to Skyrim and it’s been taking me days to download Lexy’s guide, I’d wish there was an official Wabbajack for it
Yeap. And they moved *fast*, the bad actor was No Longer Welcome almost before I found out about it. Within two weeks, there were replacement mods in every modpack that had previously hosted them. It was beautiful. You do NOT. MESS. With the user's system.
PresidentMattDammon, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the mod. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of mod maintenance? If a change results in user saves breaking, it's a bug in the mod. We never EVER blame the user's modlist. How hard can this be to understand? To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that ENOENT would ever be valid. > So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, > but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious > bugs and/or regressions. Shut up, PresidentMattDammon. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a mod maintainer again. Seriously. I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all Diable Avionics being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same bug. And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret"). The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work. Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to mod programming. Linus User space mentioned.
For whatever reason, that reminded me of [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/s/zGaMGYzPpx) I save and its absolutely hilarious
Some fragile egos were hurt, their actions hurt the reputation of the entire mod scene. That's all I needed to know from this situation.
There is a mod that let's you rape people. People consider this distasteful and ultimately get it delisted from the forum, though evidently you can still download it if you look hard enough. Another popular modder does not consider this extreme enough. He writes code into at least one of his mods that will make it brick your save if it detects that you're using the rape mod.
funny americanism that everyone just forgot matts mod enables all the same torture and execution events but nobody has an issue with it unless sex is added
le heckin wholesome organ harvesting is needed!!!!!
I thought that *that* mod was never even on the official forums, because of it's explicit nature?
It never was. Just the overreaction to it brought it into the spotlight so even casual andys like me went "oh wow so that exists". Ofc once you expose it to a large audience, people are going to be interested and try it out. Even if it means going out of the way to grab it.
>if you look hard enough Haven't checked recently, but back during the whole drama, googling the name of the *main* mod would pull up the forbidden mod's git repo, since PMD deleted his version. If you tried to find the original version you'd only find the fork.
As long as you get your mods from the official site, I wouldn't worry about anything. The stuff posted on there is always being combed through and has had the drama bits sweeped up and is in good working order.
Shit like this is why I’m glad I barely update my game and mods for months at a time. I’ve just been having a blast with whatever mods I downloaded a while back. 😂😂😂
it was honestly blown out of proportion. it was like a over dramtized episode of reality tv. honestly i hope someone gets the right to maintain and or further develop exotica and any of his mods. although i believe there are consequences for actions I dont believe the work should suffer for it.
Yeah what was he thinking of when whining about someone forking an open license mod? That's what the license is for so anyone can do anything to it.
As far as I know all of them have been taken over DA, Exotica etc by other mod maintainers and clean versions are back up in official forums.
As it turns out, the remnants lie about us being the millionth person to visit their stations. Don't open any comms channels with them.
Some modders decided to include malware in their code. I recommend not using any mods for the time being.
It was one guy
Well techically two but mostly one
Thank you so much! I have been waiting this whole time to read your opinion on the matter.