Simple mods just add or change stuff. Weather that's new items, stations, ships, factions, systems, and so forth; or new interfaces and utilities; balance tweaks or new funcitons for existing game content; whatever, the point is that they're designed to do their thing and that's it. The mod isn't intended to be interacted with by other mod — at best it's designed to minimize base game overwrite conflicts — it just makes its change to things that are already going to appear or adds new stuff flaged to hook into existing content using creation attributes like everything else.

These mods don't tend to do much if anything on their own, but they provide modders with some sort of interface to create things in new and/or standardized way. The best example is probably Dockscreen Framework. Framework mods are currently underused, probably because there's no easy way to distribute them with mods that require them without dealing with version conflicts, unid clashes, or double-inclusion issues, and also because it's harder to get players to download a mod that dosen't do anything on it's own.

System mods combine a framework with their own (often substantial) content. Popular system mods often cause players to request integration features from the creators of other mods; mods that have the capacity to integrate with appropriate system mods when both are present provide a greater feeling of professionalism and game system integrity to the players; for this reason the creators of some system mods also sometimes provide patches for other popular mods. Current and upcoming major system mods include:

• Playership Drone — Probably the biggest and most demanding one, because it's the most frustrating to use without support. Playership definitions require some changes to allow the ship to be sold, for the ship to act as a wingman/ai, and for you to return to your original copy of the ship once you leave it. Weapons currently require alternate special versions of themselves to be created to allow them to be placed into the linked-fire extra weapons slots that are used on large ships.

• Weapons Extended — Will randomize the weapons on your NPC ships unless you flag them to ignored, so may require some care from designers of particuarly complicated ship types. Includes a framework for placing multiple ammo types on one primary weapon, as well as a number of lookup-table lists that could be added to to make custom factions and such be handled better.

• Weapons Labs — Needs extra data on weapons as to what the recipie for them is and what parts you can break them down into, otherwise those weapons aren't usable at the labs station.

• Mining Pack — Has recipies to make armor out of ingots. A future version is planned to have an expanded base materials system so other mods that make stuff out of materials will want to check for it. This future version is also planned to produce and possibly break down modules for use in Weapons Labs using its materials processing device.

• Dynamic Systems — Makes systems regrow when stations die … and stuff. Might have an interface for adding new faction settings so your mod stations get rebuilt the proper mod ships and stuff. (If not, I'll eventually help RPC set up such a system —Weaver)

• Future Armor Pack — (WillyTheSquid/SDW project) Is rumored to be coming in both a standalone and new mining pack format.

• Future Economy Mod — (StarWeaver/RPC/TransGeek project) Will have extendable lists of industries that turn raw materiels into intermediate items into finished goods. Will probably produce weapons labs components if WL is available, and then produce standard weapons from recipies. Will have alternate set of recipies that will work with the mining pack's new parts in the future, as well.

• Neo Sandbox — (Eternal RPC and anyone he can talk into helping project) Will probably feature a framework for inserting new systemtypes easily. Will probably incorporate dynamic systems and the economy mod. Will probably use items from weapons labs and mining and armor packs in a 'create your own space station' system if one gets made. Will probably just require all other major system packages so it dosen't have to worry about them not being there. … On the other hand, if we get all the other major systems working well together, sandbox may be reduced to a dynamic topology creator and whatever extra factions or what have you we want to throw in …

Interoperability between major systems mods can become complicated, but when it happens it makes the overall game experience that much richer.

Um … this is all very rambly and first draft and i'm tired, so I will edit it for tightness in a week or so if no one does it first :) —weaver …