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Mod options & variants

Some mods offer a choice at deploy time — a color variant, an optional add-on, a quality preset. Whether (and how) a mod exposes that choice depends on which manifest format it uses.

Legacy manifests: a single dropdown

A mod with an old-style (legacy, no Version field) manifest that declares Options shows a plain dropdown next to it in the mod list, listing each option by name. Only one can be selected at a time; deploying installs the files from that option's own subfolder.

V1 / V2 manifests: toggle + sub-options

A mod with a V1 or V2 manifest that declares structured Options shows an edit (pencil) button instead. Each option:

  • can be toggled on or off independently — multiple options can be active at once, each contributing its own files;
  • can offer sub-options — a further single-choice list within that option (for example, an option "HUD Color" might have sub-options "Red", "Green", "Blue").

Click the pencil button to open the options editor and set these per mod, per profile. The edit button only appears when the mod actually declares Options; otherwise it's hidden.

V2 categories

A V2 mod can additionally declare Categories. If it does, the options editor groups its options under a heading per category (in the order the manifest declares them), with any option that has no CategoryRef (or one that doesn't match a declared category) falling into a trailing, unheaded group. A V2 mod with no Categories declared — or a V1 mod, which has no concept of categories at all — shows the same flat list either way. Grouping only changes how options are laid out in the editor; deploy behaves identically either way (see Manifest reference).

Mods without declared options

A mod with no Options at all has nothing to choose — its files deploy as-is, no dropdown or edit button shown. This includes any auto-generated manifest (a mod added without its own manifest.json) whose patch files sit directly at the mod's root.

Variant folders without a manifest

An auto-generated manifest can end up with Options too: if a manifest-less mod's patch files aren't at its root, DDMM looks for directories that directly contain them (a single wrapper folder, or several variant folders like Red//Blue/) and turns them into a Legacy-style dropdown automatically — the first one (after natural sorting) is selected by default. See Archives without a manifest.json for exactly how that detection works.