The game loads every zip in the folder at once, so there is no load order to get wrong. Order here means what is worth having before the rest is worth adding.
There are three kinds of thing in the suite.
Bedrock is State Ledger, Network Sync, Settings Hub, Time Guard, Weather Guard and Master HUD. None of them add gameplay. They are the shared save, the multiplayer pulse, the shared dials, the shared clock, one reading of the sky, and one draw loop for the cab. With them in place, every chapter you add later agrees with the others about what time it is, what the weather did, and where the numbers live.
Chapters are the actual year. Soil Fertilizer, Seasonal Crop Stress and Fertilizer Depot work the ground. Dairy Core runs the herd. Market Dynamics, Tax Mod, Income Mod and Fuel Costs run the books. NPC Favor, Worker Costs, Random World Events, Pro Staff Co-Op and Workplace Triggers run the people and the long game. Take the ones you want. Skipping a chapter is a supported choice, not a broken install.
The desk is Farm Tablet. One key, and it shows an app for each chapter you installed. It reads the year, it does not run it. Install the tablet on its own and you get an almost empty tablet, which is correct rather than broken.
No chapter requires a core. Every chapter looks for its neighbours when it starts and goes quiet about the ones that are not there, so a chapter on its own is a supported way to play.
The one real rule is inside bedrock itself. State Ledger is the root. Network Sync needs it. Master HUD needs it. Settings Hub needs both State Ledger and Network Sync. These are declared dependencies, so the game will refuse to load the mod if what it names is missing. If you want any bedrock at all, State Ledger goes in first.
If you want a small first farm, two shapes work well:
- The ground. State Ledger, Soil Fertilizer, Farm Tablet. Every field becomes its own soil and the map shows it.
- The books. State Ledger, Market Dynamics, Tax Mod, Income Mod, Farm Tablet. Prices move, the bill lands in winter, and cash still comes in while the fields rest.
Add the rest a chapter at a time, when you want that part of the year to start biting.
Soil Layer Installer is a leftover from earlier years. Soil Fertilizer does not need it. Skip it on a new farm.
For which machine gets which zip in multiplayer, see Multiplayer and Dedicated server. For adding a chapter to a farm you have already started, see Adding and removing mods.