Adding Workshop mods to an Arma Reforger server

Arma Reforger has its own Workshop, built into the Enfusion engine and independent of Steam's. That is good news for crossplay — mods are available on every platform — and it changes how you manage them server-side.

How it works

You declare each mod in the server configuration by ID and version. At startup the server downloads anything missing. When players connect, they do the same automatically.

No manual install on the player's side: that is what makes a modded server genuinely accessible, console players included.

Pinning versions

This is the important decision. You can let the server take the latest version of a mod, or fix a specific one.

• Unpinned, an update published by the author lands on your server and on your players without warning. Balance you spent weeks tuning can change overnight.
• Pinned, you decide when to move up, and you test first. It is the only workable approach for an established community.

What fails silently

• A mistyped ID. The mod is skipped, the server starts normally, and nobody understands why the content is missing.
• A mod pulled from the Workshop. Same effect, without you changing anything.
• Two mods editing the same content. Behaviour becomes unpredictable and hard to attribute.

Keeping the list manageable

Two habits are enough. Add one mod at a time and check the server between each, rather than pasting in ten at once. And write next to each ID what it actually adds: six months later, a list of bare IDs means nothing to anyone, including you.

What it costs your players

Every declared mod is downloaded by every new player on first connect. A long list noticeably lengthens that first entry and puts off the curious. On a public server, that is a real trade-off between identity and accessibility.

Our Arma Reforger hosting gives access to the configuration file, so you can add and remove mods without going through a panel that hides what the server is really loading.