How to find a mod when you don't know its name

Start from the behaviour, not the noun

Before opening any site, write one plain sentence about what should change and where: “the cart should go through the portal with ore in it”, “show every mob's health in the HUD”, “stop skill loss when I die”. The sentence gives you three things you can search for separately: the object (cart, mob, skills), the effect (goes through, shows, stops), and the place it happens (portal, HUD, on death).

Drop slang the author probably didn't use. Players say “backpack”; mod descriptions say “inventory slots”. Players say “grind”; descriptions say “progression” or “skill gain”. When a search returns nothing, the first thing to change is the word, not the site.

Nexus Mods: search the description, not the title

The search box at the top of a Nexus game page matches file names. For a mod you can't name, open the game's mod list and use the filter panel on the left: the field labelled “Description contains” searches the body text authors wrote, which is where the behaviour lives. Nexus treats each word as a separate AND term, so “portal ore” finds descriptions containing both words in any order; put a phrase in quotes to keep the words together, and use OR (or a pipe) between alternatives.

Two more angles work when the description field misses. Tags are applied by moderators and are more consistent than author prose — filtering by a tag such as Gameplay or User Interface and sorting by endorsements shows you the field of options at once. And every mod page has a Requirements tab that lists the mods which depend on it: open a mod you do know, and the mods built on top of it are often the ones you were looking for.

Thunderstore: one box, name and description together

Thunderstore (Valheim, Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., Risk of Rain 2 and around forty other games) has a single search box that matches package names and short descriptions, not the full README. Search the gameplay word (“stack”, “portal”, “pickup”) rather than a sentence, then narrow with the category checkboxes on the left — Building, Crafting, Server-side and so on — and switch the ordering to Top rated or Most downloaded to see what the community actually installs.

Because the box ignores README text, a mod whose short description is vague will not surface. When two or three plausible results appear, open them and read the README; the feature you want is often listed under a heading the search never sees.

Modrinth and CurseForge: filter first, then search

For Minecraft the search problem has a second half: a mod only helps if it has a file for your game version and loader. On both Modrinth and CurseForge, set the version and the loader (Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, Quilt) in the filter panel before typing anything, or you will spend your time reading about mods you cannot install. Modrinth's search then matches titles, descriptions and author names and tolerates typos; CurseForge's matches names and descriptions.

Categories are the shortcut: Utility, Storage, Optimization, Adventure and their siblings cut ten thousand mods down to a few hundred, and sorting by relevance versus downloads gives two different useful orders. Once you have a candidate, check its Versions tab for your exact game version rather than trusting the badge on the card.

Steam Workshop: tags and subscriptions

The Workshop search for Project Zomboid, RimWorld, tModLoader (Terraria) and Kenshi matches item titles and descriptions. Its real power is the tag column on the right: each game defines its own tags (Build 42 for Zomboid, 1.6 for RimWorld, a mod-type list for tModLoader), and combining a tag with the sort order Most Subscribed shows the mods most players run for that purpose.

Workshop items also list Required items and appear in player-made Collections. A collection titled “QoL essentials” or “my multiplayer set” is usually a curated answer to exactly the question you have.

Use a web search engine with operators

General search engines index mod pages and, more usefully, the forum threads where people describe mods in their own words. Restrict the search to one platform with site: and quote the behaviour: site:thunderstore.io "carry weight", or site:nexusmods.com valheim "nearby chests". Adding reddit to a plain description — valheim mod ore through portals reddit — finds the thread where someone asked your question and got the mod's name in reply.

If you remember a fragment of the name, search that fragment in quotes on its own. Half a name is often enough for a search engine even when it is not enough for a platform's search box.

Ask, and ask well

Every modded game has a subreddit and a Discord with a mod-help channel, and “is there a mod that…” is one of the most common posts on both. Answers arrive fast when the question carries the details a helper needs: the game and its version, the loader or platform you use, the exact behaviour you want, and what you have already tried. “Valheim, Thunderstore, want to move ore through portals, TeleportEverything is out of date on my version” gets a name in minutes; “any good portal mods?” gets a list you have to search again.

Or describe it and let the description do the searching

ModGenie is built for the case where none of the above works because the name is the one thing you don't have. You pick the game and write what you want in a sentence; it splits the sentence into separate needs, finds mods that do each one, and checks every result against the platform's live catalog so that nothing it shows you is invented. Each result links out to the mod's own page for installation.

It is a finder, not a manager: it tells you what to install, and the platform and your mod manager do the installing. When the catalog has no mod for what you asked, it says so rather than padding the list.