It’s been a month and a half since our last update to the Nexus Mod Manager, but, being the merciful slave master that I am, the Nexus programmers were given a two week break over the Christmas period so they could remind their friends and loved ones what they look like. That’s all over now however and it’s back to business as usual. I’m here to announce the fruits of our labours as we release NMM version 0.40.0.

This version of NMM includes our preliminary work on a feature that’s been begged for by some and outright rudely demanded by others since we first put NMM out in the public domain a year and a bit ago. That feature is mod categories, and the ability to organise your mods in to your own categories.

After updating to the latest version, NMM will ask you if you’d like to use the default Nexus site categories or whether you’d like to set up your own from the start. If you choose to let NMM specify your initial categories for you then your mods will be categorised based on the categories your mods are under on the Nexus site the mod is from. So if you have 10 armour mods, 10 weapon mods and 10 NPC mods the category manager will place your mods into those three categories automatically for you. If you choose not to let NMM set up your categories then all your mods will be in the “Unassigned” category and you can start from scratch. It’s probably important to note if you do choose to let NMM do your initial category setup you’re not forced to use those categories. You can rename them, delete them, add new ones and move mods around the categories with no limitations. The initial category setup is just a template for you to use, so it’s not one method or another.

The category manager button to the left of the mods tab allows you to do multiple different tasks to influence your categories including the ability to add more categories, collapse/expand all the categories, reset your categories to the Nexus defaults, reset all your mods to the “Unassigned” category, remove all your categories entirely and toggle hidden categories (categories with no files in them).

Hidden categories are probably worth expanding upon. If you select to use the Nexus categories NMM will add all the categories the Nexus site for that game uses, even if you don’t have mods in that category yet. These categories will be hidden unless you want to see them. However, if you download a mod from a category that hasn’t been used yet that category will then become visible, as it’s now being used. So NMM will automatically place your mods in to the correct Nexus category once the download is complete.

Something I desperately wanted in this version before I would allow it to be released is the ability for you to drag and drop your mods into categories, and also to multi-select mods by using the ctrl or shift keys like you would in windows to select multiple files. By using shift and ctrl you can select more than one mod to move at any one time, which should save you some time if you’re one of those horder-types who has millions of mods.

If you don’t care about categories or you prefer the old way of managing your mods then that’s no problem, we’ve added a button that will quickly let you switch between category view mode and old view mode.

When introducing this feature you might have noticed I mentioned this was our preliminary work on the category controls. The category view mode required a whole new control method to be made in NMM, which has not only enabled categories to work but has also enabled column sorting as well (you can now click the column headers to sort your mods ascending/descending by name, install date, version, author, etc.). However, column sorting does not work in the old view mode, and I’m aware that the old view mode will provide a quicker way of seeing things like ordering your mods by the last install date so you can quickly see which mods you last installed. What we haven’t had time to do is bring the new control method in to replace the old method, so we’re running both controls side-by-side at the moment, the old control method with no column sorting and the new control method with categories and column sorting. We’ll continue to allow you to switch between a categorised mod management option and a non-categorised mod management option, but the non-categorised option needs updating. We’ve got several other little tweaks and improvements we’d like to make which means this feature is probably about 80% done. However, as this version of NMM also contains quite a few bug fixes and a couple of other notable features we thought it would be better to get it out now, in this state, rather than later when it’s fully complete. So have no fear, the book on the new control method and category management is not yet closed.

Also worth noting in this release, we’ve added load order importing and exporting functionality to the plugin list and, more importantly (for me), NMM no longer looks like it’s crashed by becoming unresponsive when it’s doing intensive tasks. I’m sure you’ve had times in NMM when you’ve tried to check for latest versions or update other content and the program has become unresponsive and you’ve wondered if it’s crashed. Well, it’s very likely it hasn’t crashed but is instead very busy working away on what you’ve asked it to do. Unfortunately with no visual confirmation that it’s doing anything at all it can sometimes be confusing trying to work out if it’s crashed or still alive and breathing. We’ve added a new progress meter to these time intensive tasks that will show you what NMM is up to and that yes, in fact, it is working!

Here’s the complete change log:

New Feature: Categories for mods
New Feature: Loadorder Import/Export functionality.
New Feature: The logout button will now return the user to the login screen instead of just closing the program.
New Feature: Using the new mod manager control, you will be able to sort mods using the column headers.
New Feature: added progress bars when NMM is busy in intensive tasks.
Bugfix: Crash when clicking the "Get missing mod info" button and NMM was unable to find any match on the Nexus server.
Bugfix: Crash when the user enables too many plugins.
Bugfix: Crash loading non-existent or invalid plugins in the loadorder file.
Bugfix: Fomod/Omod IsMatching Version crash.
Bugfix: Overwrites Yes/No to Mod when there's no mod to overwrite.
Bugfix: NMM not saving Latest Version when it was already present in the info.xml file.
Bugfix: NMM will always use the info.xml file in the cache folder instead of the one in the original mod archive.
Bugfix: NMM renaming mods when searching for updates.
Bugfix: StripInvalidChars method crashing when the path string contained quotes.
Bugfix: NMM crashing when reading malformed version numbers in the info.xml file.
Bugfix: "Get missing mod info" button removing Install Date and Endorsement status.