The truth about Uninstalling Mods
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I once ran across a mod designed to uninstall mods and my first reaction was "you gotta be kidding." A mod that only replaces the delete key?
Then I looked at the downloads, over a quarter of a million at the time of writing. I had to rub my eyes and look again. I could understand, 250, maybe 2,500, but 250,000? Now here's the sad truth. You can't uninstall any OIV mods because the majority of what they install is in rpfs and this mod, or any other mod except CW RPF Explorer and OpenIV, can't do that. It's impossible. It can't go inside an rpf - well not without CW dlls - and even then it would need the assembly.xml instructions.
And neither CW or OpenIV can do uninstalls, not automatically. And neither, AFAIK, can do this from the command line...which would be amazing.... if they could. Sure you could reverse engineer an OIV and run it from OpenIV, but not with this "magic deletion mod".
The truth is you can only uninstall an OIV manually and painfully.
The second truth is the delete key is far easier to use than a mod once you know what to delete. Make a mistake? A verify integrity will fix it. So all this mod does is keep a record of what the vanilla folder should look like and flag anything differently so it can be deleted.
Ok, ok, i get it. There are millions of modders who don't have a clue what should be in the root folder and likely don't care. They want it all, everything done for them by a mod, preferably an AI bot. Like the guys who keep asking for the coordinates of maps when they are in the description and in the ymap data.
Which means, I"m wrong again. There is definitely a need for mods like this.
Which made think of something else. Rockstar provided an Update folder to keep the root folder intact. Based on a dozen past R* updates, only GTA5.exe and a few non consequential files get modified or replaced. The huge majority of changes take place in the Update folder - patch and dlc.
So ironically, R*, by design, give you a way to back out of their updates.
If anyone is interested in what you can install or uninstall, you can read more here. Uninstall at your own risk of course, but remember anything and everything, vanilla or mod, can be replaced other than your time - which means backup first.