After deactivating my entire modlist of 100+ mods (most of them are really small, I swear) to test a mod in isolation and then discovering that doing so also nukes your load order, I set out trying to figure out how one would back up/change/possibly optimize their load order outside the launcher. Fortunately, it ended up being very simple.

In /Kenshi/Data, there is a file called mods.cfg

You can open this in a normal text editor. It contains your list of active mods in precisely the order they will be loaded.

Any changes you make here will be reflected in the mods tab of the kenshi launcher. Reorder the lines to reorder the load order, remove lines to deactivate that mod, etc. If you insert blank lines or mods that don't exist, they'll be ignored and overwritten when the launcher saves over the config (which it does on game launch or whenever you hit "Save config").


For example, mods.cfg should look something like this:
Which would correspond with



Changing it to this:
Would then give you this:

(You can hit "refresh list" to see the changes immediately)


Thus, to back up your load order, simply make a copy of mods.cfg arranged as desired and leave it somewhere safe.

Good luck with your future modding shenanigans!


PS: A sufficiently motivated and enterprising individual could theoretically use this to build a Kenshi load order optimizer...