HFW Mod Manager vs RimSort

HFW Mod Manager is a free graphical tool for managing and packing mods for supported Decima-engine games. The listed games are Horizon Forbidden West, Death Stranding 2, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, which is marked as a work in progress. Users can add mod folders or ZIP files by drag and drop, choose variations, preview them with metadata, and pack enabled mods. Named presets save mod lists, and packing follows list order so later entries can override earlier ones. The manager can detect a known game directory and check game-version compatibility. Supported archive formats include .zip, .rar, .7z, .gaia, .forbidden, and .hfwz. Other features include hair patching, batch hair patching, and experimental face-shading fixes for custom face meshes. The Cauldron tab offers asset export, streaming-file building, and animation conversion; some functions require HFW Tools or DS2 Tools. The app is built natively for Windows. Windows users extract the ZIP into its own folder and launch HFW_MM.exe; it is not installed locally. Linux use requires adding it to Steam and running it with Proton 10.0-4 or newer.

RimSort is a free, GPL-3.0 community mod manager and sorter for RimWorld, with Windows, macOS, and Linux support. It orders mod lists from mod data, community rules, and Steam data, while detecting conflicts and warning about missing dependencies or incompatibilities. Lists can be imported, exported, saved, and appended. SteamworksPy connects with the Steam client and can launch the game through the Steam API; the Steam Browser downloads Workshop mods through SteamCMD or the client, even without a Steam RimWorld copy. RimSort also handles Git-based mods and databases, shares logs through 0x0.st, and shares mod lists through Rentry.co. Its todds DDS encoder offers three texture-optimization presets. Database tools build, compare, merge, publish, and edit rules. Optional external metadata databases require separate configuration. Releases may trigger antivirus false detections, and Snap-installed Steam is unsupported on Linux.