We released the Alpha version of our major milestone 0.60 version of the Nexus Mod Manager back at the end of January. The idea of the Alpha was to provide an optional download for users who wanted to test out the NMM profiling functionality and help us to get it ready for an official Beta release without forcing everyone to update their NMM installations. 40,000 users downloaded this version of NMM and, over the past 8 months, the NMM programmers have been working on refining this functionality and fixing any bugs reported to them. After 9 updates with very little in the way of major issues we're now biting the bullet and deciding to take the 0.60 update out of alpha and into the public Beta (which is what the "normal" NMM is).

This means that version 0.60 is going to be the official version of NMM from here-on-in. Any future updates, including new updates and fixes, will only be applied to the 0.60 branch of NMM. 0.56.1 will be the last version of NMM we released before moving to this new profiling system in 0.60.

0.60 marks a major milestone for NMM and it's also a huge change in the way NMM stores and works with the mods you install in the background (e.g. in the actual mod folders on your hard-drive for the games NMM supports). 0.60 is also the penultimate major milestone we had on our road plan before completely updating and modernising the UI and bringing NMM out of Beta and into a full 1.0 release.

The major change in 0.60 is the introduction of Profiling; the concept that you can have different mod profiles, with different variations of mods installed, for different playthroughs of your game. With the simple click of the mouse you can change from your mod profile for your Mage to your mod profile for your Thief, for example. It also has great benefits when you're testing out new mods or variations of mods by allowing you to always revert back to a profile you know works if things turn out badly for you.

Some other mod managers have had this functionality for a while now. We've had to take a very long time working on this (coming on two years) because NMM is designed from the ground up to work with all games and not just Bethesda games using the Gamebyro engine. As a result we've had to do it in a very different way to the way others have, and this has both its pros and its cons.

Following on from this release, in the next few weeks (hopefully), we're going to be releasing the first version of our mod profile backup and sharing platform. This will be a system that will create backups of your profiles that are stored on a page on the Nexus Mods website. Imagine a situation where your hard-drive fails and you lose all your mods. If you've backed up your profile to the site, with the simple click of a button, NMM will be able to download all the mods you had installed in your profile (provided they still exist in the Nexus Mods database and the author hasn't deleted them) and install them exactly how they were installed before, with no need for any further interaction. Some quite powerful functionality, I hope you'll agree.

We'll also be using the same system to allow you to share those profiles publically with other members of the site. Wondering what mods your favourite mod authors are using to get those awesome screenshots? How about YouTubers? If they setup and share a profile in NMM, you'll be able to not only see the mod list they're using, but also be able to download and install their profile and have it all setup and working exactly how it is for them. No messing around with load orders or scripted installers. No more "what mods are you using?" questions. And all the mod authors will retain any stats they would have had before, had you gone to each individual page and downloaded their mods normally (e.g. they'll still get +1 to their download counters, which opens up the potential for endorsements as well).

When you share your profiles you can choose to either make them a backup, which is private and only accessible to you, or public, and visible on a new section of the site for others to browse, view and install.

To me, this is the exciting part of this update. It's also why I want to get it out now, before Fallout 4's release in a couple of month's time.

Because this new version is a major change to the way NMM installs your mods it will require some interaction from you in order to get it working properly. The amount of interaction required will depend on how many mods you have installed, how many of those mods use scripted installers (the mods that have their own specialised installations where you can pick and choose what you want to install), and when you installed those mods that use scripted installers. If you installed any mods that use scripted installers after installing version 0.53.3 or higher (after February 23rd 2015) then you won't be asked to reinstall those mods again. However, if your setup is very old and uses a lot of scripted installers installed before February 23rd 2015 then you will be asked, one-by-one and in-turn, to install those mods again. Unfortunately, before this date, NMM was not coded to remember the exact settings you chose while using the scripted installers, so that's why you're prompted to reinstall them again.

For casual NMM users this update should be relatively painless. If you're a power user with an extremely fine tuned and touchy setup then it might require a little more work. We've tried to make it as painless as possible, but this is one of those situations where a small bit of pain right now will lead to much greater rewards later on.

The Alpha version was tested by 40,000 users and we fixed all the bugs reported to us by those users. However, as with every single update we do to NMM, we cannot account for the sheer myriad variations in people's PC and game setups and configurations. That's long-winded talk for "hey, there could be bugs!". We make new versions of NMM completely bug free on our PC's to the point where, no matter what we do, we cannot get it to do something bad or wrong. However, there's only three of us to test it. We then push it onto you guys, where we rely on you, the users, to help us test our releases fully. Hence why it's called a public Beta. If bugs are reported to us then they're patched up quickly and we release hot fixes as soon as possible. The point I'm trying to make is; if you're the type who's going to throw all your toys out the pram and start attacking/insulting us if there's a bug that prevents this version of NMM working for you, don't install this version straight away. Wait for the kind and patient souls who are willing to download, install and test this version out to report back and see if we need to do any hot fixes. If you don't see anything bad from people after a couple of days, then download and install 0.60 yourself. NMM is still in Beta and we release it as a Beta for other users to help test. If you don't want to be a part of that testing process then for the love of God don't install this version straight away. You have been warned (in multiple places). And it's your fault if you ignore that, not ours.

All bug reports should be directed to our bug report tracker. If you do come across a bug then the sooner you report it to us, the sooner we'll have it fixed (or give you a reason why it's happening). We've lost track of the amount of times someone has complained that a bug hasn't been fixed in a long time when they haven't actually reported the bug...yep, that happens. Don't forget to make sure your firewall isn't blocking connections from NMM to the site. Most firewall software will need you to reconfirm the exception for any software that's changed or been updated since last time you let it pass through. Like when you update NMM.

In the extremely unlikely event that you just cannot get 0.60 to work, and you don't want to wait for the bug report you've sent in to be looked at (remember to do that!) then all versions of NMM released since February 2015 have a backup and restore functionality built into them. If you want to revert back to 0.56.1 from version 0.60 for whatever reason then you can do that by following these instructions on our wiki.

You can download the latest version of NMM from the usual download location on our site.

All our fingers are crossed that this release can go without a hitch. But, we are standing by incase it doesn't.