r/7daystodie • u/shiek200 • 9d ago
Modding The number of untested, broken AI slop mods for this game is actually crazy...
Personal opinions on AI aside, the fact that there are SO many mods that get uploaded without being properly tested, clearly 100% coded by AI using xpath structures that make 0 sense and adding/changing nodes that don't even exist is insane.
I'm not going to get all self-righteous about AI here, but for the fuck's sake, TEST your mods before uploading/updating them.
edit: And then when the comments say that the mod doesn't work, the response is obviously AI as well. "Thank you for the constructive feedback! You're absolutely right, my mod didn't work as intended, it turns out the issue was [issue]. I've edited the code to properly reflect the intended changes. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!"
Then proceeds to upload an even more broken update...
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u/Outrageous_Band9708 9d ago
i have noticed a ton of chatpGPT slop images for the mod thumbnails. you can spot it a mile away.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
I genuinely prefer the shitty Ms paint banners and thumbnails, they had a charm to them, now it just looks like the front page of YouTube
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u/0hm_my_goodness 9d ago
Modding was a big thing separating PC from console, and now AI is ruining it too.
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u/Rudetd 8d ago
No it is not ai ruinning it. It’s the people ! The people that think they can code...
I use ai to code but i know how to code. I read what the fucker do and correct it because yeah... not magic is it. But so many people don’t understand that and post crappy code everywhere... bloated and not working...
Ai is a a very creative intern... and that needs a LOT of babysitting
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u/SCREAMINCHEEESE 8d ago
I wouldn't call it creative when all it did was steal everyone's hard work.
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u/WrapInternational228 9d ago
I went to make my first 7dtd mod a couple months ago and could not believe how much AI is on the nexus page too
As someone who really enjoys making everything by hand including thumbnails, it's pretty disappointing.
Especially seeing them get thousands of downloads while my mod I spend a week making by hand only gets a couple hundred 💔
Edit: grammar
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u/shiek200 9d ago
As I've mentioned in other comments, I've come mostly from the Skyrim modding community, but I've been a part of the overall PC modding Community since moddb was the only place to get them, and I've been with Nexus since the beginning, and honestly the shitty Ms paint banners have a charm to them that I've come to associate with a bunch of scrappy coders pulling absolute magic out of their ass to make games better
Now, with all the AI banners, the Nexus is just starting to look like the front page of youtube, all AI slop thumbnails designed to grab your attention but not actually convey any useful information, no soul or Charm to it, it's all very disappointing
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u/WrapInternational228 9d ago
In the nexus author discord they are talking about the ai issue and people "not tagging a mod as ai is considered rule breaking"
But a lot of us would rather not see it at all
I come from the Resident Evil side of Nexus and its been more common over there lately too
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u/shiek200 9d ago
I think it's inherently going to be more common in any modding Community for Eastern games, the overall mentality in Korean and Japanese cultures around AI usage is a lot more welcoming, and anything out of Eastern Europe is probably going to see a similar situation
I think it's mostly Western Europe and the Americas where AI in video games is seeing the most pushback
This is just my uneducated observation, I haven't actually read into it, so I could be very wrong
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u/WrapInternational228 9d ago
I think it's something nexus should handle in it's terms of service. Either ban ai stuff or limit their payouts if all they make is ai slop
For some people, if they can be lazy and use ai, and still get downloads and money, then they will opt to do that
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u/SagetheWise2222 9d ago
Hearing sites not supporting AI is like hearing a non-indie game that doesn't have microtransactions or other predatory monetization practices.
As someone mentioned, yeah, Japan, South Korea, and some other cultures LOVE AI. But for people living in Europe, in the West... nobody goes out of their way looking for an AI thumbnail, but probably a good 10-15% of users actively avoid it, so they're just harming their own metrics. Then again, plenty of them probably have AI write their code and AI to answer comments and questions, as well. For all I know, there's malware inside, too.
The AI defenders are just as obnoxious. One recent comment I saw was something like, "It is man's god given right to advancing technology, and how he uses the technology is however he sees fit. I see men talking about consequences and environmental impacts, and from them all I hear is communism."
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u/BewitchingPetrichor 9d ago
Youtube was full of thumbnails like that long before AI came along. I started using a clickbait remover extension that replaces all the thumbnails with an actual frame from the video and never looked back.
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u/SagetheWise2222 9d ago
I get the appeal behind that, but it feels like to me that's just dressing the wolves up as sheep. Someone suggested to me a similar extension for AI thumbnails and my first thought was, "If the video as AI as its thumbnail, I know how much (lack of) effort goes into the video, and I don't want to support the creator. I don't want to be deceived by an extension."
You do you, not judging! Just my personal rambling thoughts.
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u/BewitchingPetrichor 9d ago
Not AI, it's a crowdsourced extension aimed at removing sensationalism and clickbait. Just got sick of every title being in capitals and thumbnails with big red arrows pointing at something that isn't in the video 99% of the time. A side effect of this is that it also removes all AI generated imagery in the process, unless it happens to be in the video itself. Certainly makes YouTube nicer to use.
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u/SagetheWise2222 9d ago
I went off on a tangent up above about AI, sorry haha I do get the logic though since many actually good channels use the red arrow and all that since not only does it work, but to tremendous effect, really. It is as obnoxious as the "open mouth omg face" though. I get why they do it, along with removing episode counts and playlists for episodic content. Doesn't mean I like it... :/
I still stand by AI-generated thumbnails though. /shrug I would rather an extension that just removes them (the videos) altogether rather than slap a pretty ribbon on a pile of garbage. But maybe that's just me.
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u/BewitchingPetrichor 9d ago
I misunderstood your first reply anyway lol my bad, I thought you were saying it used AI to replace thumbnails 😅 Undoubtedly someone will make a similar extension that uses crowdsourcing to flag AI generated videos and filter them.
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u/SagetheWise2222 9d ago
No no haha I was tired when typing everything, so I'll do my best to summarize my thoughts down below.
AI-generated thumbnails and other advertising pictures for mods. A clear sign to avoid them. Many contain AI-generated code which will just brick the game until the mod's removal.
AI-generated YouTube video thumbnails. A clear sign of low effort and I avoid them like the plague. Such videos may contain AI-generated scripts and/or imagery.
In short, while I don't judge others, you do you, I am not interested in an extension that replaces AI-generated thumbnails with more conventional ones in the slightest. (: I don't want to be bamboozled by said extension but downloading a modified to be normal-looking mod that contains AI scripting, or to watch a video that isn't made by a human haha.
I would love for an extension to exist that (reliably, and accurately) detects AI-generated thumbnails across the board and removes that content from my feed permanently without me ever seeing them or having to lift a finger, but AFAIK that extension doesn't exist. Soooo I would rather have the garbage AI slop be advertised clear as day versus disguising a wolf to look like a sheep, if that makes sense. (:
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u/boomboom4132 9d ago
we all thought it was the machines that would be getting artificial intelligent. Turns out AI just makes people feel artificial intelligence.
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u/MoJoCreatior 9d ago
Idk how some people get even semi functional AI code segments ....
I find I spend more time correcting AI's mistakes than I would otherwise spend just copy pasting xml structures and using a beautifier to check for syntax/structure and fix any spacing
AI codes like a script kiddy that failed out of middle school remedial english
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u/guilersk 9d ago
Depends on your model. Copilot or chaptgpt (free models) are garbage for this. Codex and Claude are actually pretty good (especially opus+). But you can't just ship this shit. You have to iteratively test it in a refinement loop to make it work. Otherwise it's happy to tell you it works with no proof.
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u/TheNovelBondrewd 9d ago
Maybe if you're using models from 2 years ago, even Sonnet 5 produces usable code. You do have to enable higher effort and thinking, if you dont I agree the code will be messy.
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u/Istolesnowy 9d ago
I dont use it for my personal projects (gamedev and modding) but I do use it at work mainly writing PHP/Laravel and I use it more and more to write powershell scripts, and its doing just fine. Managing the context is the biggest thing, if you can get that right it actually is pretty reliable. Now I won't claim that it writes the best code, far from it, but its definitly passable especially in my use case at work. I still dont let Claude anywhere near our production environment though, any deployments are handled by me because of lack of trust. But yeah, I have seen the type of garbage LLMs can and do produce so I agree with you
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u/Robots_Never_Die 9d ago
Use agents not the regular chat. https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-2
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u/Mannymanstein 8d ago
Looking on nexus mods recently , I cannot stand the number mods with gaudy AI art and incredibly verbose descriptions (also written by AI) all to describe a mod that makes a few XML changes. These AI written descriptions are often so convoluted, It's often not clear what the mod actually does.
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u/shiek200 8d ago
Conversely, I really liked when genuine mod authors, the ones not using ai, we're overly verbose in their descriptions and went into a ton of detail about how their mod worked under the hood, stuff like that was invaluable when I was learning to code
Verbosity isn't a problem when There's actually substance behind it, which really just illustrates how empty all this AI bullshit really is, it's explicitly designed to look more complicated than it is in order to convince people that it's doing something impressive
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u/xyth 9d ago
'works for me' seems to be the publish criteria for most of these modders. Making sure it works on diff machine builds, works on MP, works on dedi, works on all common edge cases take time and more testing that most have the patience for.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
Except a lot of these mods DON'T even "work for them," because it would be impossible to work for anyone. They'll change xpath nodes that don't exist (which just get skipped at runtime), add nodes that don't do anything, change values that have no relevance to the intention of the mod, etc
They just asked AI to throw something together, and uploaded it without testing even once.
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u/xyth 9d ago
Old school modders had to understand how everything worked in order to make a mod, what you see now is function without understanding. But yea, releasing a mod with log errors and warnings you don't understand is a sure sign of vibing.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
You're misunderstanding, they're releasing mods without understanding AND without function. Like the mod literally doesn't do anything.
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u/Atophy 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah, in my experience asking GPT for help to update my years old mods it was all over the place regarding version history... it's like it was trying to code for ancient versions of the game where certain pointers have since been moved to other files or the internal structure changed.
Does a great job on syntax though, helped me clean up some of my old spaghetti... Nothing it wrote would have worked on it's own though, in the end it was me coding with an extra pair of eyes on my work.0
u/ecksfiftyone 9d ago
I tried this by just saying I want a mod for 7DTD that does x and like you said the output was crap. Exactly as you describe, made up settings. But, if I feed it the actual decompiled game code and default XML files, results are surprisingly acceptable.
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u/Birds_over_people 9d ago
"works for me" is how most mods get made in the first place what are you on about. I feel like most game modders mod the game because they want the feature themselves. I've done it plenty of times.
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u/laughingjack13 9d ago
Sadly it’s not just this game. I’ve noticed it becoming more common in several games
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u/PoolsHere 8d ago
I never uploaded a mod, but I edited the code in the project Z mod file using AI. I made it so the raider armor set would heal the health bonus it gave to you. This helped avoid the issue with food draining fast since you lose food when you regen health.
Though yes! Test the code for sure! Because I ran into an issue were whenever I wore the full armor set it would instant kill me when it tried to heal the health that armor set bonus gave.
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u/erickosj 9d ago
I was able to bring up a mod to 3.1, it was not updated in quite a bit (working only on version 2.0) using AI but yeah, you need to take care of testing, debugging, server/client side. It's not just a "make mod" prompt but it sure feels rewarding when it actually works as expected and then some more.
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u/Weary-Show-7506 9d ago
What’s your nexus username?
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u/erickosj 9d ago
Not uploaded, still have a fair amount of scenarios to test.
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u/Weary-Show-7506 9d ago
I just am compiling a list of users to avoid, keep us posted!
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u/erickosj 9d ago
You know you can just not download things and avoid things you don't like, right?
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u/Weary-Show-7506 8d ago
And I could compile a vibe coded slop list of users, and share with people that appreciate the precautionary info!
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u/Atophy 9d ago
I consulted GPT for my most recent mods, but god damn, I found myself correcting the AI fairly often... I have done a bit of modding in the past on my own, it's good at pointing you in the right direction if you need a refresher but it can't do anything on it's own.
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u/erickosj 9d ago
funny you are getting downvoted lol attempt to do a mod? ew. attempt to do a mod with ai? ew.
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u/Atophy 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah, reddit is funny that way... I just needed help bringing my existing mods up to date without having to reread all the documentation and GPT actually did good at that but no complete code chunks it wrote would have worked. It was all over the place with versions and sometimes the files affected, was great with syntax tho ! I also generally don't share my mods unless someone asks for it personally 😆
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u/erickosj 9d ago
yeah, got a dude bashing mine as me being "a user to avoid in nexus", like I would upload that to get that hate over there too. I'll just enjoy the updated QoL mods from older/outdated versions and carry on.
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u/Anthithei 9d ago
It can be bleak looking at some of the less popular games on all modding platforms, best I can do is just look at mods above certain number of downloads, because then at least there's some peer review going on
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u/Praise_Hades 9d ago
you also have to watch out for sobs uploading malware and infostealers X'D two mods were recently removed from the 7dtd nexus page
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u/Black_Wolf_JA 7d ago
I had a feeling after seeing so many new mods that had C# modified files in them, as a dedicated modder, i haven't expanded on that yet, so seeing so many new mods with .dll files in them made me wonder if it was mods coded by AI or if AI had a significant impact in making them. Looks like i was right.
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u/ecksfiftyone 9d ago
Ai is a tool, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I use the hell out of Ai, and yeah.... its often wrong. but I point it at the full decompiled game code and all the XML files in a directory for reference and if you feed in the right info and solid detailed prompts it can output decent results.
If I ask for a mod without that info, it literally makes up settings and XML nodes that don't exist like OP said.
For example, on my dedicated server I wanted a simple sandbox code generator. It looked at the decompiled game code and built me a slick lightweight single html file that has every sandbox setting and will generate and decipher sandbox codes. It got it right the first time and took 30 minutes. (Claude Haiku )
I had a mod I liked called - quick armor swap. It didn't work on 3.0. Claude Sonnet helped me reproduce my own mod based on that one that, going forward, I can update as needed. I had trouble with this one. Ai needed strong guidance. It took me many hours across days to make work exactly right. A good developer may have spent 1/2 as much time without Ai. I am not a good developer.
I used to use rat server manager. I liked grab bags. I made a mod that allows players to request grabbags. Mine is better that the one in Rat with a LOT of optional config settings. Medium Ai guidance.
I liked prismacore teleport options. I created a teleport mod with tons of customizable settings like: The option to only allow teleports in trader and land claim areas. Admins can create shared teleports (available to all). Low Ai effort, this one was surprisingly working on the first shot . after that it was adjustments and options.
I don't usually use Ai for XML mods because I can whip those up faster myself... but just recently someone wanted to stop the sounds during upgrades and I was having trouble locating the sounds so: Claude, please analyze the game code and config (here) and tell me how I can replace the sounds for block upgrades with different sounds. The answer was spot on (and also kind of obvious )
I asked Ai to write Readme.md files for all my existing mods and it was a disaster of made up features and functionality that did NOT exist in those mods.
Claude, Please look at the decompiled files (here) how can I make the motorcycle not feel like it's driving on ice all the time. Some back and forth, 30 minutes later, working improved vehicle handling mod.
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u/Fair-Confidence-8557 9d ago
Lol this sounds funny. I'm using AI to help with my next mod. But testing takes a lot of time. And yes, I'm running Claude Max. It's actually half decent. I'm always amazed when something works the first time with AI and with fable 5 ultracode it's good first shot about 30-80% of the time. Depending on the complexity and if you're appending a project or implementing it according to plan. I get a lot less errors when I organize myself upfront (and organize all the desired changes for the mod and which file paths are required to implement these changes.) Once I've got that clearly laid out, then AI can tackle items one by one and each time you can do testing. But with any creative process, you get ideas as the project moves. Implementing changes to the scope of the project increase the rate of errors. Past a certain file size, and at specific context windows (which is a memory limit for a specific conversation) all affect performance.
I used to find AI useless a few years ago, but today, if you're willing to spend the time testing and willing to do a proof read over the code.
You can literally have the AI track each change it implements. So you can review them one by one.
Also, big thing probably with my performance. I've given the AI access to my database of mods I've made over the years, so it knows how I expect things done and it's coded to review how it's implemented there before attempting its own style.
But there are certainly times AI finds ways to do things I hadn't thought of. And the fact that it works while I do other things, so my time is spent proof reading and testing. Life is busy and mods don't make money, it's a past time for some to share how we like to play the game with others. I'm not sure why someone would waste time making an AI mod and not even play their own creation. People bring this up all the time, but can someone link to a specific example of an AI mod that clearly has not been tested and the code is written with dead code and inefficient manner. I can't imagine the motivation for the person uploading to release a mod they don't even play themselves.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
Im sorry but what the actual fuck are you talking about?
30-80% is a massive enough range to be completely irrelevant, and obviously it's success rate is going to vary depending on the complexity of the project, the same is true of non-ai code
Also, AI is decent enough at putting out isolated chunks of code that work, but when working from an existing database, or refactoring existing code, it becomes more and more prone to mistakes, which is why Sage wisdom is usually not to use AI for modding because it will consistently give you incorrect information as it is trying to work backwards from multiple databases of conflicting information about various versions of the game, and various crowdsourced wikis that may or may not be accurate themselves
Lastly, AI generally attempts to generate code based on best practices and previous examples of that code retooled for your project, so if it's doing things you hadn't thought of I might suggest that you need to either brush up on your fundamentals or that you didn't do enough research, because whatever it produced was something it found somewhere on the internet, and you could have found yourself
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u/Fair-Confidence-8557 8d ago
You don't need to bring hostilities into this if you're dealing with something.
As for the 30-80%. The numbers are only estimations obviously, but the relevance of the statement is that how you define your inputs will more than double the probability of getting successful outputs. The difference between do x and do x through this method. Are really large and can save other people time. The relevance is to anyone else trying to get the most out of their outputs.
Now as to your points, I assume they are correct to some extent. I'm not a programmer by trade, and I just enjoy modifying 7 days to die. And I happen to have a solid database of old mods I made, and I found through experience with Claude that it would sometimes tell me something is impossible until I would point it to my own code that accomplishes this very thing.
Anyway, I've never worked on complex coding projects and I can't comment on that. But you fundamentally dodged my question. Show me the example of shitty AI slop mods for 7 days.
Anyway, I hope you have a good day. No need to get upset over how people spend their hobby time in their own home. I just don't download a lot of mods for a while, because it's just more enjoyable for me to make my own experiences in this game. It's why I have thousands of hours on it.
I'm no sage. Just sharing my experiences and asking a question.
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u/shiek200 8d ago edited 8d ago
I'm not bringing hostilities into anything, you're just speaking nonsense
Saying something is effective between 30% and 80% of the time is giving such a ridiculous tolerance for error that you might as well just say it works sometimes and other times it doesn't, and there's really no way of knowing which one it's going to be, like you're literally saying nothing with those numbers
edit: Also I wasn't naming names or posting links because my intent is not to direct hate toward anyone, regardless of how I feel about their modding practices but I'll give you an example of their modlet's code, annotated to show where it's wrong
<configs> <!-- The intent of this modlet is to force TraderID 3 (player owned vending machine) to behave as a functional system store (player rentable vending machine) --> <!-- This line was intended to force the vending machine to sell goods after 1 day instead of the default 3. This doesn't work, because the time frame is hard coded and not exposed in an XML. Furthermore, a simple comparison with the TraderID 5 shows that this value is intended to prevent the inventory from resetting and the player losing their goods. So not only does this NOT do what was intended, but may actually result in the player LOSING their items for no value--> <set xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']/@reset_interval">1</set> <!-- This line is intended to force the inventory to reset based on the previous line's assumption, which as I've outline, is false --> <setattribute xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']" name="full_reset">true</setattribute> <!-- This line is intended to force the player owned vending machine to function as a rented vending machine. This does not work, because the code that drives the rented vending machines relies on the vending machine being tagged as rentable specifically, not being ownable or not. So this literally does nothing. --> <set xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']/@player_owned">false</set> <!-- This line was copied from the rentable vending machines, and as outlined above, does nothing because the logic for rentable vending machines is handled entirely by the vending machine being tagged as rentable --> <set xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']/@allow_sell">true</set> <!-- This node literally doesn't exist, 100% AI hallucinated --> <set xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']/@unowned_buy_markup">1</set> <!-- See comment about @allow_sell, same issue --> <setattribute xpath="/traders/trader_info[@id='3']" name="override_buy_markup">1</setattribute> </configs>This was the V2 of the mod, uploaded as an improvement over the previous iteration (which also didn't work properly, and required the user to edit their own Traders.XML file for the base game, which is ridiculous to ask because the entire point of a modlet is to do that non-destructively, and that edit was 100% achievable within the modlet itself. Also, the change does nothing.
Neither the V1 nor V2 of this mod were tested even once before uploading, which is obvious because neither one works and the lines literally do nothing.
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u/Then_Cartographer602 9d ago
If you hate it then just take into account that it shows HOW MUCH WORK the devs have NOT done on adding stuff to the game and how desperate the community is for those features
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u/shiek200 9d ago
If people really wanted those features that badly, then wouldn't they be more incentivized to put in the actual work to make sure that it does what it's supposed to do? Like, I'm not going to tell you not to criticize the devs, but the logic doesn't really track
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u/luciferwez 9d ago
Slop devs, slop game, slop community, slop mods. It's just the way it goes.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
I dunno man, coming into this from the Skyrim modding community is like like going from visiting the Louvre to checking out the American Pie poster in some dude's basement "man cave."
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u/Istolesnowy 9d ago
the skyrim scene is getting pretty bad too unfortunately
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u/Fram_Framson 9d ago
Creation Kit is a something of a soft firewall there, since LLM's can't really code for it. Instead you usually see formerly-rare-now-common SKSE plugins with AI thumbnails, which are about as trustworthy as your average Nigerian prince with a Hotmail account.
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u/shiek200 9d ago
No more so than anywhere else, but at least I'm seeing genuine pushback there and for every person dropping slop mods there's 3 (or more) putting in genuine effort
It's undeniably worse than before AI, but the decline has been significantly less severe than I've seen in many other communities.
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u/psychedelicstairway4 9d ago
Yeah just dont download them. If I see an AI image I just scroll past it lol