Overview
This guide fixes the error ‘Downloading mods has failed! Please check mods in world settings’. This guide contains fragments of my own experimentation and solutions found on Google. If you find an error or have something to add please contact me and I will gladly update the guide.
Symptoms
When you receive the following error:
it means the game was unable to download mods required to load a world. This could have a couple of reasons. Below are some fixes that can possibly help resolving your issue.
For the rest of this guide it may be useful to keep the SpaceEngineers.log file at hand. It can be found in:
like so:
The game times out when trying to download mods
To find out if it timed out, you need to check the log file for a line that says:
Error downloading file: Timeout
This is most likely due to a firewall preventing the game from communicating. This will result in a timeout. In order to fix this, you need to open the required steam ports in your firewall for outbound and inbound rules.
I cannot provide a walkthrough of adding firewall rules to your specific firewall installation but this can easily be googled.
The default firewall can be located in the control panel under “Windows Firewall With Advanced Security“. Note that some anti-viruses have their own firewall.
A mod no longer exists or is incompatible with the current game version
Usually when a mod no longer exists the game will mark it with a red color. Though some mods can be incompatible and the game will not show this. You will have to manually track down the faulty mod and remove it from your subscribed items in the workshop. This process can take a while depending on how many mods you have.
Missing folder permissions
As it turns out, it can happen that the Mods folder in
does not have the needed permissions for the game. To solve this you may simply delete the Mods folder and the game will automatically recreate it.
Here is a screenshot of the SpaceEngineers directory in your appdata folder: