GIANTS Has a QA Problem, and I Can Prove It With One Mod

Two days ago a rust wear shader mod went up on ModHub. I grabbed it, dropped it in my mods folder, and the game immediately flagged it as outdated and not working properly. It's already been pulled.

So I opened it up.

The mod ships with an installer script. On startup it copies its own vehicleShader.xml, plus two rust textures, straight into your Farming Simulator 25 install folder, overwriting the base game's vehicle shader.

Here's the problem. A normal Steam install lives in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Farming Simulator 25. Windows does not let the game write there without admin rights. So the copy fails. Silently. No popup, no message in game. The mod then loads its Lua and starts driving shader parameters for textures that were never installed.

I checked my own data\shaders folder after running it. Nothing. No new files, not even the backup the script says it makes.

That mod could not have worked for a single person on a default install. Not one. And finding that out takes exactly one test: put it in the mods folder on a stock Steam copy and start the game. That's it. That's the whole test. Nobody did it.

And this is the part that gets me. ModHub is supposed to be the safe place. It's the one channel where console players have no choice, and where PC players are told to go instead of the sketchy download sites. The entire value of it is that somebody checked. When a mod goes up that patches files in your game installation directory, and it clears review, then what exactly is review?

It isn't just mods either. The latest map has two villages where you can't feed animals. Buildings you walk straight through because nobody put collision on them. These aren't obscure edge cases you find after 200 hours. They're the first things you hit.

I'm not asking for perfection. Software ships with bugs, mine included. I'm asking for one pass on a default install before it goes out the door.

We keep buying these. We keep making content for them. We keep telling new players this is the game to get into. At some point that has to be met halfway.

Test your stuff, GIANTS. Please.