About VOLO

Who

VOLO is built and run by me, Moonie. I'm a software developer, tinkerer, geek, nerd, lover of Dungeons and Dragons and avid gamer. I wrote the code, take in submitted orders and decide what counts as evidence. The tool is not affiliated with Larian Studios, Nexus Mods or mod.io, and nobody pays to be placed anywhere in it. All of it is public, so if you want to know what it does with your file, you can go and read the code that does it.

The load order dividers that give the sort its structure are the work of Astralities, who made them for their own playthroughs and gave permission for them to be used and adapted here.

Why

I love this game. Baldur's Gate 3 is quite possibly my favourite game of all time, but there are only so many times I can play a vanilla run and look at the same classes, items, outfits and races. Mods change the game, and they change the experience of playing it.

I am a fantasy and RPG nerd, and I put a good number of hours into various Bethesda titles, where LOOT was an invaluable part of the experience. BG3 had nothing like it when I started building VOLO in 2025. Load order advice lived in comment sections and pinned posts, it contradicted itself, and most of it was somebody's memory of what worked once. Meanwhile thousands of people had a working order sitting in their mod manager, and nobody was collecting any of it.

So VOLO collects it. The rules come from orders people played on. Where the evidence runs out, the tool says so and leaves the mod where you had it.

How it is built

Submitted orders go into a public corpus, 187 of them so far. A script reads them, works out which category each mod belongs to, and writes a masterlist of 11,273 mods, 10,376 of which land on a known position. The site downloads that file and does the sorting in your browser. Nothing about your own list is sent anywhere unless you choose to submit it.

The order the categories go in comes from counting the corpus. Every pair of mods in every submitted order is tallied to see which category tends to load before which, and the sorter follows the result. Some of it contradicts advice in comment sections. Where they disagree, the played orders win.

Two catalogues sit alongside the corpus: published BG3 mods on Nexus Mods, and on mod.io, the platform behind the official in-game mod manager. They supply two things the corpus cannot. One is the requirements a mod declares on another, which become the hard rules that no amount of counting is allowed to override. The other is a category for a mod no submitted order has placed yet, which is the weakest kind of evidence here and is labelled as such wherever it is used.

The masterlist is generated by a program, not written by hand, and the program is not clever: it counts things. Where a placement came from a count rather than from a person, the interface says so, and you can read what happened when we measured it.

Reasons to be sceptical

The corpus is small. 153 working orders is enough to see a signal and not much more. The headline agreement figure carries about 1.1 points of uncertainty, so it moves when a large order lands, and it takes something like 510 scored orders before it settles to within half a point. Submissions are the only thing that gets it there.

VOLO also only knows mods that have turned up in somebody's order. Nexus Mods lists 19,590 published BG3 mods and mod.io lists 8,800, which is about 26,326 in the wild once the ones on both platforms are counted once. The masterlist holds 11,273. Those two are not counted the same way, because a single listing can ship several files, so read it as a rough share: VOLO has met somewhere around 43 percent of what is published and knows nothing whatsoever about the rest.

886 of the mods it does know have no category from any source. They wait at the end of your order instead of being guessed at. VOLO is a starting point you check, not an authority. If it puts something in the wrong place, you are probably right and it is probably wrong.

Getting in touch

If a mod is filed wrongly, report the placement; the form asks for where it belongs and how you know, and the most useful thing you can attach is the order you actually played on, because that corrects the evidence rather than one entry. Something on the site misbehaving is a bug report, and anything else goes to the issue tracker.

What happens next, so you know whether to wait. A submitted order is handled by a script: it is checked, added to the corpus and the masterlist rebuilt, usually within a few minutes of you pressing the button, and the issue closes itself to tell you it landed. Wrong placements and bug reports are read by me, which means one person in one timezone, normally the same day and sometimes not. If a report cannot be acted on, the reply says why instead of leaving it open.

Your privacy is covered separately, in the detail it deserves.