Troubleshooting - KSP-CKAN/CKAN GitHub Wiki

This page will supply you with basic troubleshooting advice to get CKAN running on the off chance that it doesn't work out of the box as well as attempt to answer some frequent questions. Note that this page is an eternal work in progress and might lack answers to certain problems or have notes of additions to be made.

Some problems may be solved by the clean and reinstall your KSP installation.

CKAN won't start

  • If you are on an macOS or Linux system first of all make sure that you have the latest version of Mono. This also applies if you are getting the Error in autoupdate: Error getting response stream (Write: The authentication or decryption has failed.): SendFailure message on startup.

    You can check your current version with mono --version in a terminal of your choice

  • Under Linux or macOS you might need to update mono's certificates. See SSL certificate errors if you encounter errors related to certificates.

  • CKAN requires .NET 4.5 or later on Windows, make sure you have it installed and updated.

  • If you are getting a ERROR CKAN.KSP (null) - Could not find KSP version message and you have your ckan.exe stored somewhere other than your KSP directory, make sure you don't have a "GameData" folder in the same location. CKAN will erroneously assume there is a complete KSP installation there and fail. Put ckan.exe in its own folder and you should be right.

I'm on Unix, I cannot run .exe files!

You can with this one, because CKAN is magic! More seriously, the CKAN client is built using Mono, which makes it a cross-platform executable.

You will need to install the latest Mono release in order to use the CKAN client on a Unix platform.

No GUI on macOS

On macOS Catalina (10.15) or later, when you double click CKAN.app, it will open the console UI, because the WinForms GUI is no longer functional due to Apple removing 32-bit support.

Some mods are marked as "AD"

AD stands for "Auto-Detected" and means CKAN has detected the mod as manually installed installed. CKAN will not automatically update such mods because it cannot guarantee consistency.

To convert those mods to CKAN-managed ones, you can select them for "Upgrade" if they are marked as compatible with your game version. If you get an error like:

DLL for module X found at Y, but it's not where CKAN would install it

...you need to manually uninstall the mod first.

Note that not all manually installed mods can be autodetected. CKAN considers a mod to be manually installed if and only if it finds a DLL file that it didn't install with a filename matching the module's identifier in the CKAN metadata (plus some optional version info). For example, if you manually install ModuleManager.4.2.2.dll in your GameData folder, CKAN will consider ModuleManager to be manually installed. This means that CKAN will not autodetect mods without DLLs or mods where the DLL name does not match the identifier. If you are a mod author interested in renaming your DLL to help with autodetection of your mod, we would be happy to help you figure out your mod's identifier.

I have a very fast broadband connection but files are downloading extremely slow

This can be due to many reasons:

  • If you are installing very many or large mods at once the supplier of those mods might throttle your download speed (this is known to sometimes happen while downloading many mods at once from Github repositories). Since CKAN cache all your finished downloads it can at times help to cancel the download, wait a few minutes and then try again. You will not have to redownload finished downloads from the previous session.

  • Some mod developers use their own hosting solutions which might have slower upload or be under heavy load. You can see what sources CKAN download mods from in the installation window during the installation process.

I get errors when I attempt to download mods

All mods you download through CKAN are hosted on pages outside of CKAN's control. These include SpaceDock, GitHub, and a variety of more or less private solutions. If a mod repeatedly fail to download, the page supplying it might be down. If you get many failed downloads in a short time a good first step is to check if SpaceDock is up, since it is one of the primary suppliers of mods through CKAN.

If you're on Linux or macOS, make sure your Mono installation is complete and fully configured.

I get a CodePage 437 not supported error

Apparently Mono installations don't always come with as much locale support as we expect by default! If you're on a Ubuntu/Mint/Debian machine, try:

sudo apt-get install libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil

Using CKAN on Linux with Proton version of KSP

Some versions of CKAN may state that a game directory installed with proton "is not a valid game directory." If you have this issue, create an empty file in the game directory named KSP.x86_64.

In order to launch the game with Proton, you must change the game command line in Settings -> Game command lines to the following:

bash -c "STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=[STEAM INSTALL LOCATION]/Steam/ STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=~/.proton/ [STEAM LIBRARY LOCATION]/steamapps/common/'[PROTON VERSION]'/proton run ./KSP_x64.exe"

Make sure you have installed proton - the easiest way to do so is to launch any game with the proton version you want to use. In addition, you must make the .proton directory, and it can be placed anywhere you like, as long as you change the STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH environment variable accordingly.