I’ve been trying to get my head around how Dependencies work and how they are managed in MSFS Addons Linker… there is something that I’m doing wrong or not understanding fully.
Has anyone got any experience, advice or know of any tutorials I could follow?
The problem is I set up a dependency link (right click an airport, and then select the libraries it needs) but when I then try to add another item for the Profile state I’m trying to build, it TOGGLES OFF the dependency I just set even though the airport is still activated.
Unchecking the item toggles the dependency-linked one back on.
There should be no relationship between the dependency and any of these other items I’m trying to activate, so I don’t get why it’s doing it!
Anyone doing this successfully? Any tips?
Also as a lot of airport mods require the same / similar sets of extra Libraries, and generally when I load a profile it will contain ALL of a regions airports, I guess I just need to pick one airport to be the “trigger” to activate dependencies, then perhaps if SOME airports require other things, only associate the unique items to those?
I could write more but let’s see where this gets me first haha 
Thanks for reading…
I’ve never tried the linking of dependencies myself and have never tried to keep track of which airport or scenery depends on which other library. I put all the dependency libraries into a folder named base_mods and I just include that whole folder any time I’m including airports or other scenery. I think my base_mods folder is about 10 GB total, maybe a little more by now. I’ve collected so many add ons and base mods now that I could never go back and try to map the dependencies, it would take too much time to go one by one and look them up again. I just know that my base_mods folder has every dependency for all the other things. By including the whole folder I’m sure that I’m including more than I need for my selected airports and scenery (which are organized in folders by country/state), but I can live with that. Whenever I add a new mod, if it has any dependencies that I don’t already have, I add them to my base_mods folder.
It would be nice if there was a convenient way to track dependencies and only load in the needed ones but even if there is a way, I could never go back and track down the specific dependencies to map them because I have too many mods in my collection already to do that unless there would be some automatic way of doing it.
Thanks for the reply!
This here is my problem and why I started to go down this rabbit hole in the first place.
I used to do as you did, just load all libraries all the time but I’ve hit some kind of internal limit whereby Content Manager doesn’t load and the game gets stuck returning to the main menu once I’m loading over around 1000 mods it seems.
So I’m trying to be clever and streamline stuff into logical profiles.
I also re-organised sceneries and airports into countries / continents folders and global stuff : utilities / liveries and aircraft all separate to help, but wanted to go this extra step to really minimise what each profile really needs.
I agree it is not optimal, not sure if there is a solution currently, would love to learn of one.
But MSFS Add On linker is still the best solution for managing community folder add ons vs load time and performance.
For market place add ons it is more clunky to have to uninstall ones you are not using frequently to reduce startup time.
I used dependencies for a while and found it flakey so reverted to doing it manually.
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I just pinged BAD2000 to see if this is working as expected. I set up some dependencies and now the libraries I had set as dependencies no longer save with presets.
He’s always super-helpful, and pointed out the “do not automatically disable dependencies if not used” option on the second options tab. This should solve the issue you were seeing, @Baracus250 …
(I realize this response is three years late, but leaving it in case someone else is searching for a solution as I was.)
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