So, Armoured Biters updated to Version 2.0. The problem? Metal and Stars is asking for <=1.2.1 version, and is now incompat by config. It probably works fine with 2.0, as I found by manually editing the config to be >=1.2.1. but Metal and Stars hasn't seen an update in half a year, so I'm not holding my breath on it getting a hotfix. Beware, there's lots of functionality that Metal and Stars brings to the pack, so losing it would be sad.

Really considering dropping it just because of this one issue. Mainly because it prevents the modpack from being a simple one-click install as it should be.

I don't believe there is a way to download the correct version from in-game, meaning every user would have to manually download and install the correct version of Metal and Stars (which is already a lot to ask for, let alone doing the unzip fix for a more permanent solution).

I believe that anyone who cares enough about playing with Metal and Stars, will be able to figure out how to make it work. (And those who don't just won't even notice that it's gone).

EDIT: It's been booted as of v1.0.33

Now comes the fun part... Overclock modules being used everywhere in my giga save.

for anyone else having this issue, fix was posted over on the Metal and Stars mod page:

temporary fix

edit info.json of the mod in your factorio mod folder.

replace
"ArmouredBiters <= 1.2.1",
with
"ArmouredBiters >= 1.2.1",

allow to launch the game , but dont know about impact on the behaviour of the mods.

Yes, that is literally what Blaster described above lol

I still won't be putting it back in as a mandatory dependency, for the reasons stated above, until/unless they properly fix the issue from their end.

The mod license IS MIT, so if anybody wants to, they can easily release a fork with the fix described above, and I would instantly pop that back into the pack (assuming there are, in fact, no other issues).

Though if there ARE any other existing issues, they'd be the ones burdened to fix those as well. Metal and Stars dev was pretty bad at communicating fixes, from what I could tell (who knows how many of those issues on their mod portal page are unaddressed, there's plenty of reports since the last release six months ago)