Banished mod support is on the way, says developer

Harvest time is a busy season for the town market.

I killed a lot of people in Banished. You may have read something about that. The medieval settlement simulator has a distinct SimCity vibe to it but operates on a much more personal level: Individual settlers have names and lives and sometimes alarmingly delicate constitutions, which is problematic when you're in the middle of a heavy winter and the guy who's supposed to be out chopping trees has turned into one. That sort of dilemma may soon be considerably less troublesome, however, as developer Luke Hodorowicz recently revealedthat he's spent the past few weeks working to bring mod support to the game.

Time constraints meant that support for mods in Banished was never really on the table, Hodorowicz explained, but as it turns out, the toolset he wrote to assist with the game's development is actually pretty well suited for the job. Of course, a good bit of tweaking is still required, and that's what he's been up to recently: Ensuring that multiple mods won't conflict and that save games keep a record of which mods were being used for which games, so players can experiment with different mods in different games.

"I've also got to decide what to do about achievements," Hodorowicz wrote. "Some mods, like translations shouldn't change the difficulty in getting achievements, but other mods can allow placing buildings for free and adding resources and citizens with the press of a button. That clearly nullifies the achievement process."

It also cuts down on the likelihood of a disastrous crop failure reducing your thriving hamlet to a deathly-silent ghost town, but then that's half the fun, isn't it? Not necessarily, actually; it's one thing to watch Godzilla stomp through your faceless metropolis, but another thing entirely when little Doren takes his last breath, shudders and dies because you forgot to plant the turnips. Even so, I'm happy it's coming: In many ways, Banished already feels like a bizarre, cruel little digital laboratory, and in that light the addition of mod support is a natural fit.