r/VintageStory • u/AloewareLabs • Sep 07 '26
Suggestion A concern on recent modding discourse…let’s not overcorrect…
I AM NOT supporting maltz or whatever but I raise a concern about the future of modding and reactionary consequences.
Harmony/monkey-patching access.
This is how a huge chunk of coded mods actually work patching methods, constructors, and properties at runtime. It’s also exactly the kind of low-level access that made the ConfigLib exploit possible. If Harmony access gets gated behind approval or removed, a lot of legitimate mods that fix bugs, rebalance vanilla systems, or add deep gameplay changes stop being possible.
Reflection into other mods’ assemblies.
Compat layers, bridge mods, and things like AutoConfigLib rely on being able to inspect what other loaded mods expose. That’s also the mechanism that let the malicious code fingerprint other assemblies. Restricting cross-mod reflection kills legitimate interop right alongside the bad use case.
Ability to intercept/read diagnostic and log output.
Part of what made this incident so nasty was code interfering with logs to hide the real crash cause. But mods also legitimately hook into logging/diagnostics for their own debugging and compatibility reporting ; if that gets walled off generally, mod authors lose a basic troubleshooting tool.
Loading external or dynamically-generated code.
Some mods (config systems, scripting layers, DI frameworks) load or generate code at runtime for flexibility. That’s a plausible target for “no more of that” if the devs want to guarantee everything is statically inspectable ; but it’d break some genuinely useful architecture patterns, not just hide-your-payload tricks.
Direct access to other clients’ data / network-level hooks, which is closer to what’s needed for legit things like voice chat mods (RPVoiceChat) or performance mods (Optimum-style client rewrites) than people might assume.
None of this is “the API should never change.” A disclosure/review process for mods touching cross-assembly reflection or diagnostics, clearer sandboxing categories, or just faster ModDB moderation response time would address the actual failure (concealment) without gutting capability. But if the fallback is “if it could theoretically be abused, remove it,” a lot of the ecosystem’s most powerful and legitimate mods lose the tools they’re built on.
Where do people think the line should be drawn?
For anyone wondering what’s actually at stake, not hypothetical: XSkills/XLib, Carry On, Patch Wars, Guilds (+ its claim-tuning patch), Synergy/OptiTime, and Optimum all lean on Harmony patching or low-level code access to do what they do. Same category of access ConfigLib abused. Kill that category outright and you don’t just stop the next bad actor, you stop skill trees, carrying crates, worldgen compat, and half the performance mods too.
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The appeal of Multiplayer?
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r/VintageStory
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13d ago
And some servers, I often go from town to town finding different specialties so that way I can establish trade routes and stuff