Have the forest on steam, fresh install & latest version, fresh download of API, done the youtube version checker fix, no mods active, but for SOme reason it keeps saying 'error occured while applying mods'.

WELL, turns out the API program requires internet connection for at least the first time you launch the game through the API. thats it.

i have a firewall so it didnt have internet connection, i almost always download and install mods myself (already had them downloaded so i dropped them in the api's mod folder),and nowhere ever did it say that it requires an internet connection to work. *sigh.
thought i'd let other people know this 'discovery' after spending hours and hours looking for a fix and reinstalling EVerYthinggg. :/