Annual Funding Request and News Update

Another year down and an other fantastic year for Wabbajack. It's crazy to think that the project is almost 6 years old, time certainly has flown. Once a year or so I like to reach out and ask users to spread the word about this Patreon, and ask for your financial support. Each time I write one of these posts the donations go up, and then slowly dwindle over time. When I see the donations dip under the costs of keeping Wabbajack running, it's a reminder to me to remind people that this project is community funded and only exists with your support. Wabbajack has always been a free open source project and will always remain so, thank you for your support over the years. The support sent to this site helps with the costs of running the Wabbajack CDN, server costs, various software and hardware purchases, etc.

Speaking of server costs, 2025 ended with a bang, this chart shows the details: 15,000 modlists installed in a single day! This increase was somewhat expected and somewhat surprising, and it's a combination of a few factors:

Firstly, Fallout Season 2 came out, and with that we always see a rather massive boost in interest in Fallout games. As this latest season takes place in New Vegas it was predictable that "Viva New Vegas" would start trending. We see an average of 2000 installs a day.

Secondly, the community around LoreRim and the associated sub-lists remains strong, that has been a rather major contributor to our metrics for some time.

What none of us did expect, was that two Youtubers, rather well known in the Bethesda YT space, would take some time to install "Star Wars Genesis" the Starfield total-conversion modlist. Between Kevduit and Luke Stephens that's almost a total of 1mil YT views directing people to use Wabbajack. This modlist alone has added roughly another 2000 modlist downloads a day.

If you do the math, that's only 6000 of the 15,000 peak installs on the graph above. And that just points to the vast amount of Wabbajack lists available. At this point the project truely has something for everyone. It's fantastic to see so much interest in modding, Wabbajack, and these disparate games. Seeing people enjoying modding has been the driving force for me on this project for so many years.

On the development side of things, yes work on Wabbajack has been slow. Partly because in some ways the project is "finished" and somewhat because my time has been limited. I will be the first to admit however that Wabbajack has a ton of jank in it, and I want to improve that over time. To that end there's two main areas I want to focus on improving in the next month:

Firstly, our deployment and release pipeline needs to be automated. For 6 years, releasing Wabbajack has involved me building, digitally signing, and uploading all the code by hand. It's not a ton of work, but it's a good 15 minutes that I have to set aside for each release. In that process I have to remember the correct incantations, and the correct wording of the prayers to make to the Machine Spirits, so that the code signing goes off correctly and everything is packed the way it should be. As a funny aside, I find digital signing so bothersome that my password for our code cert login is just a sequence of profanity.

Good news though, we've been accepted to work with SignPath.org, a site that offers free, automated certificate signing for OSS projects. This is the missing piece we needed for fully automated builds. I need to write a few scripts, but after that we should be able to hit a button and Wabbajack will automatically build and release on its own.

Secondly, I'm working on ways to speed up the Wabbajack install process. I'm in the middle of testing a new feature that extracts archives while other archives are downloading. This should merge the two longest steps in the installation process, cutting install times down significantly. Optionally we'll have a configuration setting for deleting these archives after they install correctly. Most people will likely not want this auto-delete feature, so it will be disabled by default, but it will allow users to install Wabbajack lists on smaller hard drives. No more 200GB installs plus 150GB for downloads.

All in all, it's been a fantastic year for Wabbajack. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who contributes to the community, Discord moderation, building modlists, spreading the word, etc. I couldn't have done any of this without all of you, and I'm excited to see what happens in 2026.