What's new

Broken arcanas fixed

J0nathan550 compiled the arcanas that broke in the item builder again by hand, and the builder now puts on his fixed versions: Razor runs facing forward, Pudge's back is whole, Juggernaut has all his runs and attacks. That covers Crystal Maiden, Drow Ranger, Earthshaker, Juggernaut, Legion Commander, Pudge, Razor, Rubick, Skywrath Mage, Spectre's second style, Terrorblade and Windranger, and their Has bugs and Broken marks are gone. For Crystal Maiden and Rubick the fix covers the first style; their other styles build from the game's files as before.

The app downloads a fixed arcana the first time you put it on and keeps it. Until the download finishes, the arcana goes on from the game's files, and the fixed one replaces it on its own. Any other item you pick for one of the arcana's slots still wins that slot. Terrorblade's arcana in Catalog → Tools builds from the fixed version too, in the colour you choose.

Io is checked

Io's items, its arcana Benevolent Companion included, have been played through the builder and work, so they no longer say Not checked.

The item builder keeps up

Putting an item on now takes about a quarter of a second, however many you already have on. Before, every item built all the others again: the thirtieth took twelve seconds and froze the window. The app stays responsive while it builds, a longer build shows its progress on the bar at the bottom, and Play waits for the build to finish before it starts the game. A friend's preset with items in it builds once, not once per item.

Settings → About now credits J0nathan550 for the arcanas. Thank you, J0nathan550.

Arcanas in the item builder

With safe mode off, Cosmetics → Items now offers every hero's arcana along with the rest of their items. An item that comes in several styles lets you pick the style, and the builder brings its sounds and voice lines, the hero's portrait, minimap icon and ability icons with it. A few arcanas are not right yet. Their card says Has bugs or Broken, and before you put one on the window tells you what goes wrong: Razor walks facing backwards, for example. Io is in the builder for the first time, its arcana included, and its items say Not checked until somebody has played them.

Items you already picked are built again once after this update, and after any later update that changes how they are built, so a fix reaches them without picking them again. Thanks to J0nathan550, who wrote this and played every arcana through it.

The app in Simplified Chinese

Choose 简体中文 on the first start or in Settings. Hero and item names come from your own game's Chinese text, and the catalog searches in Chinese and by the original names. Anything new shows in English until it is translated. Thanks to F21HGG.

A proxy for downloads

Settings → Download cache now has a field for an HTTP or HTTPS proxy. Test it, save it, and the catalog, mods and tools download through it; leave it empty to connect directly. The installed app's own updates still connect directly. When a download fails on the network, the error now suggests a proxy or a VPN. Thanks to ezvacss.

A screen reader hears more

A message that pops up, such as a mod installed or an error, is now read out, inside a mod's window too, and the reader is told which section and which category are open.

Fixed

• In My mods, a mod whose picture does not load keeps its row the right shape.
• The grey captions, such as the category under a card's name, are a little brighter, so they stay readable over the lighter part of the background.
• The style dots on a card sit a pixel further apart, so each one is easier to hit.
• The installed app can no longer be run as plain Node.js or have a debugger attached, and it loads only its own code.

A crash no longer leaves half a mod behind

Installing a mod writes several files into the game, and the app now notes each step before it takes it. If the app closes in the middle, from Task Manager, a Windows update or a power cut, the next start either finishes the change or takes it back. You get the mod whole or not at all, and My mods agrees with the game folder.

The app also saves your library and settings in one step. A save cut short used to leave My mods empty, with your mods listed as somebody else's files. A write that failed halfway, on a full disk for example, could leave the mod it replaced renamed to .mmtx; the app now puts it back.

The keyboard reaches everything

The name on a catalog card is now a button: Tab to it and press Enter to open the mod. Install it from there, and remove it in My mods, without touching the mouse. A window takes the focus when it opens, Tab stays inside it, and closing it brings you back to where you were. Screen readers now hear names for the sort, hero and language lists, and stop reading icons out as words like check_circle.

The window can only ask for what its buttons do

The app checks every request from its window: where it came from and what it carries. The page can no longer change the game folder or your Discord account, and the Folder button of a tool opens only a tool the app installed.

Each release is tried as an update first

Before a release goes out, CI installs the previous one, gives it a mod and a favourite, installs the new one over it and checks that both are still there.

Terrorblade's arcana in any colour

Catalog → Tools now opens with Terrorblade's arcana. Point at a colour and the arcana's picture takes it before anything is built. Install the whole arcana puts it in My mods. The app builds it from your own game files: the model, the horns, the glow and the ability icons, so you see the arcana without owning it. If you own it, Own the arcana? Colour only recolours yours.

The kill effect and the arcana's sounds come with the item itself, so the mod has neither. The mod loads before the catalog's hero mods, so an arcana mod from there does not cover your colour. If a Dota update changes the files it is built from, the app builds it again in the same colour. To pick another colour later, use Recolour in its menu in My mods.

Catalog mods say when a new version is out

When an author replaces a mod in the catalog, My mods marks yours as a new version and offers Update all. An update keeps the mod's place in the load order, and keeps it on or off as it was.

The pre-patch mark comes off from the menu

If a mod marked pre-patch works fine for you, remove the mark from its menu in My mods.

Mods load again after Dota's 7 October update

With safe mode off, Dota's 7 October update could stop the mods in your language folder from loading. Weather and items kept working, the rest did not.

To let mods change items, the app adds its own folder to the list of places Dota reads, and it copies that list from Dota's own file. The update renamed one line in Dota's file. The copy the app had written before the update kept the old name, and the game skipped your language folder.

The app now compares its copy with Dota's file at every start and while it is open, and writes it again when they differ. Opening this version is enough. With safe mode on, nothing broke.

My mods names the mods a Dota update reached

A mod replaces some of Dota's files with its own copies. When an update changes one of those files, the mod keeps putting its old copy back, and sometimes a HUD or a screen breaks.

From this version on, the app notes which of Dota's files your mods replace. After the next Dota update, a mod whose files the update changed or removed gets a pre-patch mark in My mods, and the banner about the update names it. If something in the game looks off after a patch, start with those mods. The mark goes away once the mod's author updates it and you install the new version.

What's new keeps paragraphs apart

This window ran a section's second paragraph into the first, as you could see in the 2.8.0 notes. Each paragraph now stands on its own.

Everything the four 2.8.0 betas brought, now for everybody.

Items: a hero's default items in the look of any of its wearables

Cosmetics → Items lists every hero. Open one, pick a slot and choose any of that hero's wearables: the default item in that slot takes its look. Only you see it, and no mod file changes. You can add particle effects on top, one or several: fire, lightnings, frostbloom, snow, bubbles, sand storm and ghost. Frostbloom and snow do not hold on every model.

Nothing reaches the game until you press Equip. Each item you put on is a row in My mods with its effects named, and turns off like any mod. A hero's window opens with Sets: Equip the whole set puts every piece on at once, each as its own row. A piece the builder leaves alone, such as an arcana, stays in the window, dimmed, with the reason.

Heroes opens on a grid of heroes

Heroes in the catalog used to be 463 mod cards in one run. It now opens on one tile per hero, with the hero's portrait, how many mods it has and whether you have one installed. Press a hero to see its mods. The switch in the toolbar brings the list back.

The window moves

Every screen was redrawn on new foundations, and things now move to where they go instead of jumping there. In the catalog the highlight slides to the category you pick, and a mod window opens out of its card. In My mods a mod you move up or down the load order slides to its new place, a removed mod folds away, and a pack's contents open instead of popping in. A switched-off mod is dimmed, so you can see at a glance what the game will load. If Windows is set to show fewer animations, the app keeps still.

Shaders, trees and river load first

Slots 02-29 now belong to shaders, trees, river, hero effects, ranged attacks, hero items and optimization, and every other mod starts at 30. Before, moving a hero mod above a shader could trade their slots. Moving and dragging now keep a mod inside its own part. If your order comes from an earlier version, the app lays it out once at start, while Dota is closed: it keeps your order inside each part and tells you the order changed.

The anti-cheat notice says what to do

When Dota cannot check the game before matchmaking, it shows a Valve Anti-Cheat window saying your machine could not be verified, and with mods installed that reads like a ban on the way. Usually the cause is a damaged install or a Steam that needs a restart. The app now replaces the text of that window with the steps that fix it: verify the game files in Steam, restart Steam, and turn mods off with the Mods switch. The text follows the language the game shows, in all 28 of them.

It lives in one file of the app's own, pak64 in the language folder. It is not a mod: My mods does not list it, the Mods switch leaves it on, and uninstalling the app removes it. If one of your mods sat in slot 64, it moves to the next free slot.

Whole-map terrains built for an older map

Some catalog terrains, the TI and Dota+ ones among them, replace the whole map, so each carries Valve's map as it was on the day it was built. After Valve updates the map, such a terrain can remove trees, cost frames and get matchmaking refused. The catalog and My mods now mark these terrains "old map". When the game's map changes, the app switches an old one off once and tells you. If you turn it back on, it stays on until the next map update.

18+ mods stay hidden until you say yes

The catalog marks five mods 18+: explicit hero models. The app asks once whether you are 18 and want them shown. Until you say yes, they are hidden from the catalog, the search, Recently added and Favorites. Settings → Catalog has a switch to change the answer. Mods you already installed stay in My mods as they are.

Every author of a mod

A mod's window credits everybody the catalog names on it: its authors, the people who reworked it and the people who sent it in, each linked to their page. Before, it named the first author, and the other two links opened a page that does not exist.

Fixes

• Checking the game's files in Steam while the app was open turned your mods off until a restart. The app now notices the check and puts its patch back.
• Moving a mod in the load order while Dota or an antivirus held one of its files could leave the mod split between two slots, and swapping two mods in that moment could delete one of them. A move now happens whole or not at all.
• A settings file saved with a byte order mark, as Notepad saves it, lost every setting on the next start, the game path included. It now loads.
• On a first start with no internet and nothing cached, presets could not be listed, shared or applied. They work now.
• Next to Minify, My mods showed a yellow warning that contradicted itself even when nothing was wrong, and could name the folder "dota_null". It now names the folder the game reads, and warns only when your mods are the ones not loading.
• When the wiki answered with a server error for a cosmetic's picture, the app took that for "no picture" and showed none for a week. It asks again next time now.
• On a short window, such as a 1366x768 laptop at 125%, the safe mode window cut off its title and both buttons. It fits now.
• After switching to English, the sign-in button and the mods switch stayed in Russian until a restart.
• A tab pressed right after switching screens could do nothing, and a search typed on another screen opened the home screen with no results.
• The download bar stayed on screen after Source 2 Viewer finished downloading.
• A preview paused in its first second started playing anyway. It stays paused.
• Applying a preset with a mod the catalog lists without a file no longer tries to download a file called "undefined".
• The support report you send from Settings now says whether download mirrors are failing, which tools are installed, and whether item-table changes wait for a rebuild.

Thanks

h6rd wrote the item builder, and develops it further with TheFleece. Thanks to the testers who ran the four betas.

The project moved to github.com/dota2modmanager

The repository now belongs to an organization with two maintainers, and every change is read by the one who did not write it before it ships. This version looks for updates and for the project's notices at the new address, and its GitHub link goes there too. Older versions keep working: GitHub forwards the old address, so there is nothing for you to do.

The Download button in your Discord status now opens dota2modmanager.com instead of the old page on GitHub.

Your Windows user name stays out of the diagnostic report

The report listed the folders it looked at by their full path, and a path inside your home folder carries your Windows user name. That part is now written as %USERPROFILE% (~ on Linux), so a report you paste into Discord shows the folder and not who you are.

Electron 44.4.3

The engine the app runs on moves from 44.3.0 to 44.4.3, with the fixes Electron shipped in between.

Thanks

Omkar Nikam wrote the diagnostic report change. It is the second pull request he has sent here.

A beta channel, for the people who asked to be first

A few accounts now get builds before everybody else. If yours is one of them, Settings has a switch under Discord; if it is not, there is nothing there and nothing to miss. Signing out of Discord gives up the beta with it.

The list is held in a signed file the app reads on its own, so being added or taken off it does not wait for an update, and it holds a fingerprint of a Discord account rather than the account.

Staged rollout was dropped here for a good reason: an urgent fix has to reach everybody at once. This is the other half of that argument, a few people who know they are running what has not been released yet.

The Download button works again in the portable build

A portable copy that found an update answered "no update" when you pressed Download, and has done since 2.3.0. It read which version to fetch once at start-up, before any check had run, so the answer was always empty. Installed copies replace themselves and were never affected.

Fonts and cursors stop coming back after you remove them

Since 2.0.0 the app put back any font or cursor that Steam's file check had replaced, and it decided what to put back by comparing files. A mod that ships some of Valve's files unchanged looked identical at once: one install logged the same cursor set as "restored after verify" 29 times in August, and removing such a mod could leave its files behind as if they were the game's.

Every font and cursor the app writes is now recorded by its hash. A file holding what the app wrote is the app's file, and it is no longer mistaken for the game's. A copy installed before this reports the old way once more, and putting it back writes the record.

A cosmetic pick, called what it actually is

The window and the site used to say "free cosmetics". That was never quite true, and it hid the part worth knowing: the app takes the standard item your account already has and draws it with the look of another one, in its own copy of the game's item table. Nothing is bought, nothing enters your inventory, and only you see it. Every text now says that instead.

Every release is scanned, and the result is published

Two false positives reached people before anybody here knew there was something to answer. Each release is now looked up on VirusTotal by the checksum it already carries, and the verdict goes into the release notes as a table with a link for every file, whatever it says.

Smaller things

• The app can be told about another place to download mods from without shipping an update, which matters on the day GitHub is unreachable.
• A damaged VPK tree or archive is refused in this app's own words rather than crashing or reaching you in a library's.
• A language folder that has to be created is created in one step, so a slow disk cannot leave it half made.

A technical release

Nothing in the window looks or behaves differently. This one is about how a release reaches you. The machinery below was built this week, and it should be tried on a release nobody is waiting for rather than on an urgent fix.

A release is installed and used before anybody can get it

Until now CI built the installer and published it in the same breath. Two releases in September went out with installing broken: every check was green, because nothing had ever pressed the button.

A release is now created as a draft, which no installed copy can update to. CI takes the installer and the AppImage from that draft, installs them, and clicks through the app: install a mod, switch it off, restart, switch it on, remove it, checking the game folder on disk after every step. Only when both pass does the release become public, for everybody at once.

Every file of a release can be checked

Each release now carries SHA256SUMS, the SHA-256 of every file on it, and a signature for that list made by the release workflow itself. If you want to be sure the installer you downloaded is the one this repository built, with the GitHub CLI:

``` gh attestation verify Dota-2-Mod-Manager-Setup.exe --repo TheFleece/dota2-mod-manager ```

Beside it is a list of what the app ships inside it. The README and SECURITY.md show the other ways to check a download.

Notices in the app expire on their own

The app can put a dated notice in front of you, and until now one stayed until somebody remembered to take it down. The thank-you for hanta's video was meant to run for a week in August and was still on screen in the middle of September. A notice now carries the last day it is shown, and that one is gone.

One less pointless request at every start

The app asked GitHub for a settings file that was never published, got a 404 and carried on with what was built into it. It no longer asks.

Built on Electron 44

The app moves from Electron 43 to 44, and with it to a newer Chromium carrying the last month of security fixes. Nothing in the window should look or behave differently. Before this went out, a catalog mod was installed through the window on 44 and landed on disk the same way it did on 43.

The zip library, updated for a security advisory

adm-zip, which the app uses to read mod archives, had an advisory: when it unpacks an archive onto disk, it follows links already sitting in that folder, so a crafted archive could write a file outside it. This app never lets adm-zip unpack onto disk. It reads each file into memory, checks its path and size, and writes it itself, so no mod you installed could have used the hole. The fixed version is in anyway, together with a newer YAML reader for the update check.

Matchmaking works again after a Dota update

With mods on, a Dota update could leave the game refusing to queue. Nothing in the app looked wrong: it reported the patch on, signed and in order.

Dota ships a list of hashes for the files it checks, and it ships a new one with every build. This app adds one line to that list for the file it edits. What it got wrong was where it read the rest of the list from: a copy it had saved the first time you turned mods on, which on one machine was six weeks and a dozen Dota patches old. So after an update it put that old list back, the client compared its own current binaries against hashes from weeks earlier, and refused to queue.

It now writes the list the installed build shipped, plus its one line. The saved copy is not read any more.

If queueing is still refused after this update: the old list may still be sitting in your game folder, and nothing this app does can know what the right one was. Steam, Dota 2, Properties, Installed Files, Verify integrity of game files puts it back, and takes a minute. The next Dota patch replaces it too.

A preset brings back the mods it names

Applying a preset whose mods were no longer installed switched every other mod off, switched on only the members still there, and said "Preset applied". The card above the button already said how many of its mods were missing; the button just never did anything about it.

Now the mods the catalog still has are installed first, and then the preset is applied. A mod of your own that is not on this computer cannot be fetched from anywhere, so the app names it instead of leaving it out without a word.

Safe mode can be switched off on Linux

It could not before. Pressing the switch answered dota.signatures not found and stopped there, which meant no mod could be loaded by the game at all on Linux.

The file it was looking for does not exist there. On Windows the client keeps a list of hashes in bin/win64/dota.signatures and checks the files it loads against it, so this app has to write its own line into that list. Valve's Linux build ships bin/linuxsteamrt64/ with the client, forty shared libraries and no list at all, and the app treated that as a broken installation rather than as a different one.

Nothing about it needs signing on Linux, so the patch is simply written and that is the whole job. The switch also stops showing a warning dot for a list that was never there, and the app stops re-applying a patch it thought had failed.

Reported with a photograph of the folder, which is what made it obvious.

Updates have a second source on Linux too

They were supposed to since 2.6.5, and for Linux they never did: the mirror was filled before the Linux build existed, so it carried the Windows files and nothing else. Four releases went out that way. Both Linux files are on it now, and a release that leaves any of the six behind fails loudly instead of quietly.

A preset someone shared with you finishes

Opening a shared preset file installed everything in it, wrote it to your library, and then stopped one line short of switching the mods on. Nothing said so: the window went on waiting for an answer that had already failed. The same file split that broke Install in 2.6.5 broke this, in the same way, and nobody had reported it because reaching it needs a preset file from another player.

An action that fails says so

Any failure in the process behind the window used to leave the button it belongs to stuck on "Installing...", with the reason written only to a log file. That is how a plain error looked like a hang for two releases. The button now comes back and the reason is on screen.

Installing a mod works again

It did not in 2.6.5 or 2.6.6. Pressing Install did nothing at all: the button sat on "Installing…", no progress, no error, and nothing was ever written. Every mod, everybody.

The handler behind that button checks one thing before it starts - whether installing has been switched off from our side, which it never has been. When the process code was split into files on 6 September, that check moved to one file and the function it calls stayed in another. It threw on the first line, before anything was downloaded, and the window went on waiting for an answer that was never coming.

Nothing was damaged by it. No file was written, no mod half-installed. The button was lying about being busy.

The check now lives in one place that both files are handed, and the tests here register every one of these handlers for real and call it, instead of reading the files as text and finding the names all present.

Mods that would not install now install

2.6.5 started checking every archive against the checksum its author publishes, and refused anything that did not match. Two things then went wrong on the same day, and between them they took mods away from people who had done nothing.

One mirror was serving old copies. The job that fills it skipped any file already there under the same name, so a mod its author had replaced kept its old bytes for as long as the name stayed the same. Twenty-four of them, one since August. Anybody who cannot reach GitHub is served from that mirror first, got the old file, and the check said no.

And the check said no was the end of it. A download stopped at the first mirror that disagreed, while three others holding the current file were never asked. That is now the other way round: a wrong checksum costs that mirror its turn and the next one is asked. All twenty-four mirrored copies have been replaced as well.

The list itself can also be wrong. It is rebuilt by a bot, and on 10 September it named a hash for one mod that no copy of that file has ever had - so that mod was refused for everybody, whatever their connection. When nothing matches, the app now takes what the catalog's own host serves rather than refusing a mod over a list that has not caught up. What a mirror hands over still has to match: none of them can give you bytes that GitHub did not.

The app's own updates and the toolchain behind item icons are held to their checksums exactly as before. Those are pinned here, and a mismatch there is the thing being guarded against.

And it says so in your own language

A refused download used to report itself as checksum mismatch for Some Mod.zip, in English, in the middle of a Russian interface. It now says the file does not match what the mod's author published and to try later.

The app keeps working when GitHub does not

Everything here has come from GitHub: the catalog, the mods, the previews, the updates. On 17 August GitHub was down for three hours and none of it worked, and for a good part of the userbase it is not reachable on an ordinary day either. Every one of those now has a second place to come from.

The mods themselves: a quarter of the catalog had never reached the copy this app falls back to. Five categories are stored differently from the rest and the job that fills it walked past them, so 313 mods (item effects, hero items, creeps, denies and towers) were installable only while GitHub answered. They are all there now.

The previews: those were fetched straight from GitHub, so a catalog full of empty squares was what anybody blocked from it saw. A picture that does not arrive is fetched again from the copy, and if that fails too the tile says so instead of leaving a grey rectangle.

Updates: the app checked GitHub Releases and nothing else. It now falls back to our own copy, both for the installed build and for the portable one, and goes back to GitHub as soon as it answers. The manifest and the file it describes always come from the same place, so nothing can hand over one version's checksum with another version's build.

And the icon toolchain, the 50 MB download behind item pictures for free cosmetics, has a copy as well.

It tells you what went wrong

Opening the app with no connection, before it had cached anything, used to put this where the catalog should be:

Could not load the catalog: fetch failed

That is Node's phrase for being unable to open a socket, printed at a person. There is now a screen that says there is no connection, that the mods already installed keep working, and that the catalog will be back when the connection is. A server that answers badly gets a different message, because telling somebody to check a connection that works sends them to fix nothing.

The catalog is signed, and mods are checked against what its author published

The catalog is read through public proxies for anybody who cannot reach GitHub directly, and until now nothing proved the list came from its author rather than from whoever was carrying it. It carries his signature now, and this app refuses a catalog that does not verify.

Mod archives are checked the same way. They used to be trusted the first time they arrived and compared against that first copy afterwards, which catches a substitution on every download except the one that matters. The catalog now publishes a checksum for every archive and each download is measured against it before anything reaches your game folder.

The window opens at a size your screen has room for

On a 1366x768 laptop, and on any screen with Windows scaling at 125% or 150%, the app asked for a window bigger than the desktop and got it. The part hanging off the bottom held the launch bar and the end of every list, and nothing about it looked broken: the list scrolled, and the rows it scrolled to were past the edge of the screen. Restarting did not help, because the size was asked for again rather than remembered.

A crash on some Windows setups

The watcher that notices a Dota update could take the whole app down with it, without an error and without anything in the log. It happens when the path to your game is a short 8.3 name or reaches the folder through a junction, which is the sort of thing a moved Steam library leaves behind. Found by running the tests on Windows for the first time.

Smaller things

• English users saw a catalog category called "Sound" that should have read "Audio". Thirteen translation keys were written twice and two of the pairs disagreed; the duplicates are gone and the build now fails if another one appears.
• A preset you share is wrapped in a page that hands it to the app, and that page lived on GitHub Pages, so the link would not open for anybody who cannot reach GitHub. New links point at dota2modmanager.com. Links you have already sent keep working.
• The site no longer runs an animation on phones that could make Safari give up on the tab after a few seconds of scrolling, and it loads pictures sized for the screen showing them.
• The Library said Minify was being left pak65-67 and pak99 for a release after pak99 stopped being reserved. It reserves 65 to 67, which is what it now says; a pak99 already on disk is still recognised as Minify's and left where it is.

Mods reach the folder the game reads again, if you run the new Minify

Minify v1.14rc7 puts a command of its own in front of Dota in Steam's launch options, so that pressing Play patches first. Storing that escapes the quotes around its path, and this app read launch options up to the first quote and stopped there. It lost the -language sitting behind it, concluded nothing was set, and went back to installing into the folder named by the voice setting - which Dota does not mount while that option is there. Your mods were on disk, switched on, in a folder nothing reads.

Launch options now parse the way Steam writes them. If your mods went quiet after Minify updated, they come back on the next start of this app, and nothing has to be installed again.

When Dota will not start, the Library says why

That same Minify setting is "Run patches upon launch if required", and it is on by default. It can swallow a launch: if its patch decides your launch options need fixing, it closes Steam and waits for it, and your launch goes down with Steam. This app is nowhere in that sequence, since Play here opens the same steam:// link the Play button in Steam does. It is the window you have open when nothing happens, though, so it now tells you the wrapper is set, whose setting it is, and where to switch it off.

pak99 is back in circulation

Minify merged its English localization into pak66, so it will not write pak99 again and this app can hand that slot out. A pak99 already sitting in your folder is still read as Minify's and left alone.

Colours changed once, then never again

Turn animations off in Windows and the mascot in the title bar worked on the first click of a session and ignored every click after it. The spin now ends on a clock rather than on an animation that never runs.

Deleting mods no longer looks like deleting your presets

Clear out the Mods tab and every preset read "0 mods" above the words "empty (everything will be switched off)". Nothing had gone: a preset remembers mods rather than installations, which is what lets a build outlive a reinstall, and the card counted only the ones it could find on disk. A preset now shows everything in it, with the mods you do not have drawn as outlines.

The interface no longer needs the internet to draw itself

Every icon in the app is a glyph in a font, and that font was fetched from Google at startup along with the two typefaces. When it did not arrive - no connection yet, a slow or blocked network, a cache emptied by an update - each icon fell back to the word behind it, and the window filled up with campaign, shield and play_arrow where the pictures should be.

The fonts now sit inside the app and are read from disk. Nothing about drawing the window touches the network any more, and the window's content policy no longer permits it to.

Updating no longer asks whether to delete your mods

2.6.1 shipped an uninstaller that asks what to take along with the app - the mods in the game folder, the app's own data. It was supposed to appear when somebody removes the program. It appeared during updates as well, with the boxes already ticked, because an update replaces a version by running the old uninstaller and nothing checked for that.

Nothing was deleted unless the window was confirmed, and cancelling it left everything alone. But being asked to delete your mods while merely updating is not something anybody should have to read carefully, and I am sorry for the fright.

Updates are silent again. The questions appear only when the program is being removed from Windows, and nothing destructive is ticked in advance any more: deleting mods and app data are now yours to choose, not the app's to assume. Putting the game's own files back stays on by default, because a game left carrying an edit with the app that undoes it gone is the one outcome that cannot be fixed afterwards.

Mods now go where the game is actually looking

A -language in Steam's launch options outranks the language setting inside Dota. The app did not know that, so on a machine with one set it did the worst possible thing: it wrote the voice language back on every start, lost every time, and left your mods in a folder the game never opens - while telling you everything was fine. Nothing was broken and nothing was lost; the mods were simply somewhere nothing reads.

It follows the launch option now. If it names a language Dota knows, that folder is where mods go, and mods already installed move themselves there on the next start. Remove the option later and they move back on their own. Nothing changes for anyone without one.

This is also what makes running alongside Minify work rather than merely be described: Minify is what puts the option there, so following it means both sets of mods end up in the one folder the game reads.

Everything the app said about Minify, corrected

A machine running the current Minify showed three notices at once that contradicted each other and the game. All of it was wrong, and all of it is fixed.

Minify records the language you asked it for and the folder it writes to separately - ask for English and it notes "english" while building into dota_dutch - and the app was reading the wrong one, so it named a folder that exists nowhere and concluded that neither program's mods were loading while Minify's plainly were. It also offered a button to move Minify's mods into its own folder, had no wording at all for "the game is reading neither of us", and suggested setting Minify to Russian, which for anyone whose game is not in Russian would have hardcoded it there.

pak99 joins pak65 to pak67 as slots the app will not use: that is where Minify writes its English fix, and 99 was the last slot this app hands out, so a large library would have reached it first.

Smaller things

The Library no longer lists dota_mods - the app's own folder for free cosmetics - as if it were a language. A language folder that already exists is left as it is instead of being given a gameinfo.gi it never needed. And moving mods between folders skips anything another program owns, whichever folder it is pointed at.

Turning safe mode off now explains itself

It used to be one line of file names, and nobody read it. It is a proper window now: what the app does today - drops its .vpk into a folder Dota already reads, touching nothing of the game - and what it will do instead, with both files it edits named and what lands in each. Copies of both are kept before the first write, so switching back puts them back byte for byte with nothing left behind. Dota wipes that edit with every update and the app writes it back on its own, which the window now says too. And the sentence that actually decides it: editing game files counts as unsafe in Dota modding, no ban for it in 8+ years, no guarantees from us.

Switching tabs, and importing a pile of mods

Opening a tab rebuilt the whole screen from nothing. Coming back to Heroes meant 513 cards built again and about 90ms of frozen window, every time. Screens are kept now: around 30ms, and it no longer grows with the size of the category. Each screen also remembers where it was scrolled to, instead of inheriting the last one's position.

Importing a batch never let go of the app while it worked, so Windows put "not responding" on the title bar for the several minutes a big pack takes. It hands control back between mods now, and the bar counts them: "Reading mods 31 / 60" instead of one width until it is over.

Removing mods

Deleting the file was never the slow part - it takes about two milliseconds. The wait was the item table being rebuilt afterwards, and a selection paid for it once per mod. It is rebuilt once for the whole batch now, and the rebuild itself went from 2.6 seconds to under half a second. Twenty mods removed in about six tenths of a second, where the same twenty were close to a minute.

Presets keep what you saved

A preset used to hold the mods it named only as long as they stayed installed: delete one and it was cut out of every preset, and reinstalling did not bring it back. Presets now remember what a mod is rather than which copy of it was on the machine, so deleting one leaves the build alone and installing it again anywhere fills the gap on its own. The card says how many of its mods are not installed right now.

Free cosmetics are no longer part of a preset. A pick is not a mod - it owns no file and only exists while safe mode is off - and folding the two together is why applying a build used to strip whatever courier or weather you had chosen.

Item pictures come from your own game

The cosmetics picker used to match items against a wiki: rate limited, wrong when two items are named alike, and nothing at all offline. Almost every picture is already in the game in a form that needs no decoding, so it now comes from there - correct for your build, instantly, with nothing downloaded. The few that are stored compressed still fall back as before.

Alongside Minify

Minify loads mods the way this app does: by naming a language folder, of which Dota mounts exactly one. So the app now reads Minify's own configuration, works out which of the two the game is actually set to read, and says so - including the case where its folder is not one the game reads at all, which is nothing to do with us.

It also stays out of its way: the pak slots Minify writes are never used, the "disable all mods" switch no longer renames its files, and its output is not offered in My mods as something to adopt or delete. Its files are recognised by the marker it packs into what it builds, and this app leaves a dota2modmanager.json naming its own, so either side can tell whose a file is. Nothing of Minify is moved, renamed or deleted.

Where the two genuinely cannot both win, the app asks: Dota reads one map archive, so a terrain and a Minify map mod are the same file. Installing one replaces the other, and you now hear about it first.

A launch option that overrules everything

Older guides hand out -language something freely. While it is there Dota takes both language settings from it and mounts the folder it names, whatever this app does. The Library says so now, and where to remove it.

A skin that borrows from another hero comes in whole

The app reads which heroes a mod dresses from the models it carries, and two things fooled it. A persona lives in a folder of its own - models/heroes/antimage_female is Anti-Mage's Wei, invoker_kid is Invoker's Acolyte - so a pack that dresses one hero looked like a pack that dressed two. And skins hang props from other heroes on themselves: a Clinkz set carries a Phoenix immortal on its bow, a Sven one wears Disruptor's back piece. That one model counted as a second hero.

An import that reads as two to four heroes cuts itself into a mod each, so both cases arrived as two half mods: the bow in one, the hero in the other, each under a name that was half right.

A persona now reads as the hero it belongs to, along with the folder names Dota kept from before a rename - bard, lanaya, drow, gyro, tuskarr and the rest - and a hero carrying under a quarter of the leading hero's models reads as lent rather than dressed. Naming and cutting ask the same question now, so a mod that comes in under the right name also comes in whole. Over 75 mods cut out of one Skinchanger pack, the number that split themselves goes from three to none.

The piece an item points at instead of shipping

A mod can point a default slot at one of Valve's own models and still be the author's work: he repaints that item by shipping its textures, and his entry only ever names the model. Tinker's Deep Sea Robot back is exactly that, and the import threw the entry away because the mod carries nothing of the model it names, so the back never appeared on the hero at all.

Such an entry is now recognised by the item folder the mod's own textures sit in.

Thanks

hanta made a walkthrough of the manager. His channel has a line in About now, beside the version and the licence.

The day GitHub is down is no longer your problem

On 17 August GitHub was out for three hours. Everything this app reads lives there: the catalog, the mod archives, the file that recognises mods you installed by hand. The mirrors it already had are all proxies standing in front of GitHub, so they went down with it. The window opened, the catalog was empty, and nothing could be installed.

There are two more places to look now, and neither is GitHub. The catalog and its data are copied onto the app's own site every time that site is built. All 915 mod archives sit in object storage behind cdn.dota2modmanager.com, refreshed nightly. GitHub is still asked first, because it is the source; the others answer when it cannot.

A catalog that fails to update no longer disappears

If the app could not fetch a fresh catalog, it used to show you nothing, even with a perfectly good copy already on your disk from an hour before. Now it shows the one it has and says so in a line at the top. An old list of mods beats an empty window.

It runs on Linux now

The release carries an AppImage. Make it executable, run it, and that is the whole installation.

Dota's Linux build keeps its mods in the same folders as the Windows one, so nothing about how mods work changes. What had to learn a second platform is everything around them. The app finds Steam where your distribution keeps it rather than in the Windows registry: the ~/.steam symlink, the XDG folder, the flatpak home, and both spellings of the steamapps directory, which Windows forgives and Linux does not. It knows the game is running by asking for the process instead of running a Windows tool. And it tells your desktop that it owns d2mm:// links, so a preset somebody sends you opens the app the same way it does everywhere else.

Being straight about how new this is: every change is built and started against a throwaway game tree on Linux by our own CI, and somebody ran this build on a real desktop before it shipped. That is a week of Linux against a year of Windows. If something looks wrong, the issue tracker is the place, and it will be fixed faster than it was found.

Small things

A Shadow Shaman mod whose folder is spelled shadowshaman said it was for "Shadowshaman". It says Shadow Shaman.

A portable build, for people who would rather not install anything

The release now carries a second file, Dota-2-Mod-Manager-Portable.exe. It runs from wherever you put it, including a stick, and writes nothing into your system.

Portable here means the data comes with it. Your settings, your mod library and the download cache go into a folder next to the exe, so the same stick on another machine comes up with everything you already had. If that folder cannot be written to, which is what happens if you drop it in Program Files, it falls back to the usual place and keeps working.

The one thing it cannot do is replace its own exe. So instead of updating in place it fetches the new build, puts it beside the old one and tells you it is there. Nothing on your disk gets rewritten, and the installer version updates itself exactly as before.

Mods can no longer be installed where there is no game

Somebody moved his Steam library from C to F. Steam left the empty folder tree behind, as it does. The app checked whether a folder named dota existed, decided it had found the game, and installed forty-three mods into the leftovers. All forty-three were listed as installed. None of them were anywhere the game could see.

The check is now for Valve's own files, not for a folder name, and it runs in three places: at startup, where a path that stopped being an install gets replaced by the real one automatically; in the folder picker; and before a download starts, so a mod with nowhere to go no longer costs you 300 MB first.

If Dota cannot be found at all, the app says so and installs nothing. It always meant to. The warning simply never appeared, because the old check called those leftovers a game.

Small things

The release page could not be updated for a few minutes after 2.2.0 went out, which also left its own update manifest split across two pages. Both are fixed, and the release now checks itself before it is called done.

There is a SECURITY.md and a security.txt now, so anybody who finds a hole has a private way to report it instead of a public issue.

Mostly work you will not see. Update anyway.

The app trusts the catalog less than it used to

Mods, previews and guides come from a repository this app does not own, and when GitHub is blocked they arrive through public proxies instead. That path used to be treated as friendly. It is not, and this release stops treating it that way.

Guide text now passes through a fixed list of allowed tags, so a guide carries words and links and nothing else. The window refuses to navigate away from its own page. A file name that arrives with a catalog entry is used as a name and can no longer become a path. The one program the app downloads and runs, the Source 2 reader, may now only come from that project's own releases, and the file pinning its version is fetched from GitHub with no proxy in between.

The interface looks the same. Everything above is in the commit history if you want the detail.

A current browser engine underneath

The app draws its window with the same engine a browser uses, and this one had been left ten major versions behind, which means two years of published fixes it never received. It now runs Electron 43, and the installer that ships it was rebuilt from scratch to check nothing broke on the way.

Mods follow the speech your game is set to

Dota mounts the folder named after your audio language, and the app used to answer that by writing "russian" into your game for everyone. Korean speech now puts mods in dota_koreana, Chinese in dota_schinese, Russian where it always went. Nothing is asked and nothing about your game is changed.

English is the one language Valve mounts no folder for, so those mods go to dota_russian and you hear no difference: Steam decides what gets downloaded, Dota decides what gets mounted, and a folder with no voice pack in it serves mods while the speech keeps coming from the game's own files. The English-voices switch is gone with it. Set English in Steam, which is where that belongs.

The program says who wrote it

A NOTICE file, a line in Settings under About, and two additional terms allowed by section 7 of the GPL: keep the credit, and give your version its own name. The licence is unchanged and the app stays free software. Fork it, sell it, gut it. Say whose it was.

Everything here came from what people said after 2.0.

Drag a mod to where it should load

The arrows moved a mod one slot per press, so getting a mod to load before thirty others took thirty presses. Rows now have a grab handle. The list rearranges under the pointer as you move it, the other rows slide out of the way, and it scrolls itself when you near the top or bottom. Nothing is written to the game folder until you let go.

Every mod shows its file

A row now prints its own file, named exactly as your mods folder names it, and carrying the .off suffix when the mod is switched off. There was no other way to tell which of forty pak files belonged to which mod.

A preset looks like what it holds

A preset used to be its mod names joined by dots, which at eighty mods is a paragraph nobody reads. It now leads with the covers of the mods in it and a line of counts by category, with the full list one click away and grouped. A preset of eighty looks the same as a preset of ten.

The window behaves like a window

Text no longer selects when you drag across a list, and pictures no longer pick up and follow the mouse. Both used to happen while scrolling, and the second one ended with the app offering to import the picture you had just dragged off its own card. Text fields still select, and so does the file name on a mod row, which is the one string there worth copying.

The help menu no longer slides behind the mods when the page scrolls, and it closes when you scroll away from it.

The app says where it lives

The help menu now has the site next to the wiki and Discord, in the language the window is speaking. Nothing in the program mentioned it before.

A support report that says what is wrong

Same button, same file, same place to send it. Inside, the archive now opens with a one-screen summary that starts with the verdict: if nothing is wrong it says so, and if something is, it is named in plain words - the game is not patched, mods are going to a folder the game does not mount, downloads are failing, the drive is nearly full. A second, full report next to it carries everything for whoever is going to dig: the whole mod list in load order, the open windows, the errors the interface reported, the updater and the config.

It also collects more: the two game files our patch edits, Dota's own console log if you have ever run with -condebug, and listings of the app's own folders.

Fixed

• The pill that says a mod is overruled had its icon sitting crooked next to its own text.
• "How many mods are overruled" was blank in every support report ever sent: the report asked for something that does not exist and quietly wrote nothing.
• Update errors were thrown away entirely, which is unhelpful when the report is that it never updates. They are still silent for you, and now recorded for a support report.

The whole app, rebuilt. Six tabs became four, the catalog was redrawn, and most of the questions the app used to ask you it now answers itself.

Four sections instead of six

Catalog, My mods, Presets, Settings. Guides moved inside the mod they explain: open a mod and the guide is there, on the same card. Tools became what they always were, a category of the catalog, so they sit in the rail with everything else.

The catalog, redrawn

• Five columns instead of four, and a card that leads with the picture. Tags say what a mod changes; which item slot it fills is a dropdown, because that is one answer rather than a set. Both are translated now.
• A mod with several looks shows them as coloured buttons with their names on, and you can flip between them on the card itself without opening anything.
• An installed mod wears a green frame you can see from across the grid.
• Heroes is grouped hero by hero, A to Z, and scrolls four times faster than it did.
• Opening a mod takes a third of a second and comes out of the card you clicked.
• Counts are gone from the rail, the tiles and the headings. They were catalog statistics, and you came here to install a mod.

An install list

Click the plus on a card to put a mod aside, keep browsing, then install everything at once. The list has its own search, so a list eighty mods long is still a list you can work with. That was the most asked-for thing in Discord: people were installing eighty mods one at a time.

It wears the hero you pick

Eight palettes from the catalog's own art, and a little animated mascot next to the logo that switches between them. Click it and the whole window follows.

My mods is a list again

A row is a picture, a name, a category and a switch. Everything rarer lives under the right mouse button: rename, remove, open the folder, change the load order. The order is always available, not only when something looks wrong.

Sharing a setup is one button

One Share button opens one sheet: the link is already made and the file is next to it. It says what each of the two carries, so nobody sends a link expecting it to include a mod that is not in the catalog.

It stopped asking about languages

The app no longer touches Dota's text language, keeps the voices Russian by itself, and puts mods where the game actually looks for them. If your mods were stranded in another folder from an older version, they move over on the first start. English voices are a single switch in Settings, and turning them on leaves every mod in place.

It survives a Dota patch

The app notices a game update when it lands rather than at the next start, and puts back what the patch wiped. While Dota is running it does not write to the game folder at all: it says so and waits for you to close the game.

All of the change, or none of it

Installing, importing, switching and deleting now write to the game folder as one transaction. If anything fails halfway, everything goes back to how it was, including the files that were displaced to make room.

Downloads that finish

Several mirrors instead of one, a download that resumes where it stopped, and a checksum on what arrives. A half-finished file in the cache is re-fetched instead of installed.

It puts back what Steam's file check takes away

Verifying game files in Steam removes the patch, the item table, the voice setup, fonts and cursors. The app notices and restores all of it without asking.

It reads the game rather than guessing

• Item pictures come from Dota's own files, so anything Valve adds appears without an app update and without downloading a 48 MB wiki dump.
• A mod that came with no picture gets one out of itself, from the art the author packed inside it.
• The app asks the game which items a mod replaces and who wears them, so a mod is named by what it actually does. A "bundle for 8 heroes" turned out to be one hero.
• A mod whose files are supplied by another mod is marked covered, and the app tells you which one the game is loading. It decides that by comparing the files themselves, so two mods that happen to carry the same stock file are not accused of fighting.
• A folder of loose game files can be turned into a mod, and a mod can be unpacked back into a folder. Drag a folder onto the window and it just works.

Fixed

• Favouriting a mod could stop installs from working. Saving any setting made the app forget it had found Dota, so the catalog claimed the game was not installed and every install refused until you restarted. Present since 1.15.0.
• An archive can no longer lie about its size to make the app unpack a bomb, and a file inside an archive can no longer be written outside the folder it was meant for. That applied to any archive the app accepts, including a preset somebody sends you.
• Chips on a card stay on one line instead of pushing the card's own layout apart.
• After moving between screens, cards and buttons could stop responding. The app now waits for a screen to exist before wiring it up.
• My mods no longer breaks when there are files in the mods folder that the app did not put there.

You decide which mod loads first

Dota mounts mod files in order, and the first copy of a shared file is the one you see. The app used to work out who covered whom by comparing what every mod ships, then offer to swap the two. It got that wrong far too often: two mods that happen to carry the same stock texture are not fighting over anything, and a badge telling you a working mod is "covered" helps nobody.

All of that is gone. The Library lists mods in the order the game loads them, and every row has arrows. Move a mod up and its version of any shared file wins. No warning before an install, no badge to decode, no button promising to sort it out for you.

A file you put in the mods folder yourself is a mod

Such a file used to sit at the bottom of the Library as a row reading pak90_dir.vpk, with an empty square where a picture goes and nothing you could do about it.

• The app reads the file and names it after what is inside, next to the portrait of the hero it turned out to be for.
• Adopt takes in any mod file now, not only the ones the catalog recognises. A file nobody has a name for joins your library as an import.
• A file byte-identical to a mod you already have is marked as a copy, so you can delete it instead of keeping two rows for one mod.
• Data volumes (pak90_000.vpk) belong to their index. They no longer show up as separate rows you cannot name or act on, and deleting the mod takes them with it.

Sets, arcanas and item mods arrive with a name and a picture

The app knew where Dota keeps hero models and missed where it keeps cosmetic items: models/items/<hero>, materials/models/heroes and the econ particle folders. A set or an arcana therefore came out with no hero, no name, no category and no picture. All of those read correctly now, down to which slots the set covers.

It also treated every spelling of a hero folder as a separate hero, so a single-hero skin could claim to be a bundle of three and offer to split into parts that make no sense. crystalmaiden and crystal_maiden are one hero again, and so are nyx and nerubian_assassin.

Presets

• A preset link used to vanish the moment your build held one mod of your own, with nothing said about why. It now carries the catalog mods and names what it had to leave behind, so you know to send the file for those.
• Mods arriving inside a shared preset get what a file you drag in gets: a name from their content, their item blocks lifted out, a split when one file holds several heroes.
• Update overwrites a preset with whatever is enabled right now, and the pencil renames it. Retyping the name exactly used to be the only way, and a typo quietly left you with a second preset.
• Drop a .d2mm anywhere in the window and it opens in Presets. Drop a .vpk anywhere and it imports. The tab you happen to be standing on no longer decides.

Fixes

• Safe mode left Dota asking you to verify your files, with matchmaking refusing to start: the opposite of what safe mode is for. Switching it on puts back the one game file the app edits, and the app rebuilt that file one tab character shorter than the copy Dota ships. It still loaded, so nothing looked broken, but it no longer matched the signature Dota checks it against. The app now rebuilds the file exactly, verifies it against Dota's own signature list before writing it, and repairs a bad copy it saved earlier. When it cannot, it says so and points you at Steam's file check rather than leaving you to guess.
• Sharing a preset counted nine mods you had installed from the catalog as your own: it packed them into the file whole and left them out of the link. Five catalog sections list their mods in groups (creeps, towers, hero items, item effects, creep deny) and the app read only the ungrouped ones. A build that came out at 111 MB is half a megabyte now.
• Switching a mod off, or turning everything off with the master switch, cost imported mods their name, their content tag and their picture until you switched them back on. The app looked for a mod's file under its plain name, and a switched-off mod is renamed on disk.

Fixes

• After Dota updated, safe mode left the game asking you to verify your files, and matchmaking would not start. Turning safe mode on rebuilds Dota's list of file signatures, and the app rebuilt it from a copy saved before the update: the list then described the older build instead of the files on your disk. Turning safe mode back on reapplied that same old copy, which is why only Steam's file check cleared it. The app now refreshes its copy whenever the game updates, and changes nothing in the list but its own line.

Fixes

• A mod exported for someone else, or shared inside a preset, carried its models but not the item-schema blocks that give it effects and icons: the same blocks the app lifts on install and keeps on the record. It now carries a compact copy of them, read back the same way on the other side.
• Adopting a mod file another tool had already dropped into the mods folder skipped that same step: it became a library record, but its item blocks stayed unread and its effects never showed up.

More cosmetics with a picture, fewer library rows with none

• Not every cosmetic's picture is filed under the name the game uses: some (couriers with their own wiki page, mostly) are illustrated with a plain screenshot under some other name entirely. The app now asks the wiki's exact page for its picture directly, instead of only ever guessing a file name.
• A "Loading Screen" or "Versus Screen" cosmetic with no picture of its own now falls back to its outfit's picture, for when the outfit has one and that exact screen doesn't.
• An imported mod recognised as skinning one hero shows that hero's own portrait instead of an empty box in the Library. An unmatched cursor set or an unsplit multi-hero import get a stand-in picture too, instead of nothing.

A support report, one file instead of a round of screenshots

Settings has an Export report button now. It writes a single .zip: Dota's path and language settings, the app's own settings, the installed mods, the patch state, a listing of the mod folder's files, and the app's recent log. Send that instead of a screenshot and a copy of your settings.json.

• The app now keeps a small log of its own on disk outside of testing too, so a crash you can't explain still leaves something to look at.
• Your Discord name is the only personal detail in the report, if you're signed in - no id, no picture, and the sign-in token was never saved to begin with.

Fixes

• The three HUDs 1.13.0 said the wiki had no picture for now have one: Liquipedia keeps pictures for a few dozen looks Fandom never got, Battle Pass 2022 HUD among them, and the app asks it once Fandom has come up with nothing at all.

• What's new, in the app. The app updates itself in the background, so you used to be handed a new version with no idea what moved. Now it shows the changes once after an update, and Settings has a button to read them again.
• A shared preset link now opens a page that shows the whole build with pictures before anyone is asked to install anything.
• The catalog has a Favorites filter, the one the cosmetics already had. It shows what you starred without leaving the category.

Fixes

• Cosmetics the wiki files under another spelling stayed blank tiles: the game writes Aghanim's Labryinth 2021 HUD, and it calls two HUDs a Hud Skin where the wiki does not. The app now asks the wiki which file it keeps such a look under. Three HUDs stay blank because the wiki has no picture for them at all.
• A mod whose preview is a video showed an empty box in the Library. You get its first frame, and a mod installed without a picture borrows the catalog's.
• Installing a pack dropped the picture of any mod that comes in several styles.

Mods that share files now stack instead of fighting

Install a hero set and a separate item mod for the same hero, and both stay on. The one on top supplies the files they share, so item mods from the catalog can be worn over a set.

• The Library says who is on top and who is covered, and a Move up button swaps the two.
• A fresh install goes on top of whatever it overlaps.
• The old warning claimed only one mod of the pair would load and told you to switch the other off. That was wrong.

Fixes

• Mods shipped as several VPK volumes kept the packer's own file names for the data archives, which left half the mod under a name the game never mounts. Every volume now moves to the app's slot together with its index. This is what put files with a leading ! in the mods folder.
• Deleting a cosmetic left the green "installed" badge on its catalog card until the next restart.
• Cosmetic pictures could go missing for a week: one refused request to the wiki was remembered as "no such picture". Only a real 404 counts now, and requests go out in small batches. Names the wiki spells its own way (Mega-Kills: Axe, apostrophes) are found too.

Cosmetics work like the rest of the app

• Favorites and search show them, in a section of their own.
• Clicking one opens its page instead of installing it on the spot.
• The Library gives them a select-all, a count and a disable-all of their own, and the bulk bar takes them.

• Ctrl + wheel now looks at what the cursor is over: the title bar, the status bar and the category rail resize themselves, everything else scales the content.
• Every scale lives in Settings: one slider for all of it, plus a per-part block for the content and the three panels.
• The tab strip scrolls and swipes, so no tab is out of reach at a large scale.
• Packs export as a single .vpk file.
• Fixed: the panel grips did not drag at all, and scaling with the wheel shuddered.

• Set Dota's own text and voice language from the app.
• Mods follow the game's audio language folder after Dota's 2026-07-24 update, which stopped mounting made-up language folders.

• Fixed the Discord status icon and the master mods switch.

• Discord Rich Presence: your friends see the app while it is open.
• Privacy policy and terms pages.

• Sign-in moved to the title bar, and copying a preset link no longer opens a dialog.

• Share a preset as a .d2mm file or as a link, and sign in with Discord to put your name on the builds you share.
• Multi-volume imports fold into one VPK on the way in.
• Conflict detection stopped counting the filler assets every mod carries, so it only warns about real overlaps.