I’ve played Minecraft from the beginning and one of the greatest parts about the game is the development of not just mods but modpacks.
Modpacks allow a modpack designer to cherry pick mods from the community and blend them together to make a new game experience that is easy for players and server admins to run.
We really need that in Ark, and to be supported in the Steam Workshop.
I see Ark as a next-gen modding platform and it really needs to pick up the things that makes Minecraft so popular.
We also really need other opposition elements outside of dinosaurs so we can grow and expand past a dino-centric game universe, but that is another topic.
As far as modpacks go, you know you can add mods to a public collection on Steam, right? It’s pretty much the same thing, as the collection page has a button to subscribe to all mods in the collection at once.
There are a few big problems with making mod packs on steam (Other than using collections as Nightchade suggested):
The person making the mod pack would need the source files of every mod they want to add.
The mod pack would have to be uploaded to steam as an entirely new workshop item.
As an extention of #2, by doing this you run the risk of people having to download and keep a ton of duplications of the same mod because any mod that is part of a mod pack will not be recognized as the same mod in another pack (Or the base standalone mod for that matter)
The reason something like Feed the Beast is so popular is because modding Minecraft is a manual thing, for you and I I guess thats no issue, I’ve been modding games since oblivion and its only a mater of throwing stuff in a map. But to a lot of people this is intimidating !
Things like FtB, Nexus Mod Manager and Steam Workshop have eliminated this border entirely, especially Steam Workshop since there is noting else to do but click ‘subscribe’ while FtB and NMM are still apps you need to install and configure.