Ksp Science Checklist Mod

Using the Science Checklist in KSP

The Science Checklist mod tracks which science experiments you have completed and which data you still need to collect. It pulls from the game's built-in science system and gives you a checklist that updates as you fly around Kerbol's gravity well. Most people install it because the default UI doesn't show anything except what you clicked on. I found this mod on GitHub under the name ScienceChecklist, originally by kusti8. The mod itself is usually available as a .dll you drop into your Mods folder. There's a wiki page and sometimes a direct download link on the same GitHub repository. If you're using CKAN, it shows up there too. After you install it, you'll see a new button on the bottom bar — looks like a clipboard or checklist icon. Clicking it opens a window split into tabs. The main tab shows experiment types, not individual vessels. You can see how many times each experiment has been performed and whether it has yielded repeatable data yet. If you hover over a grayed-out entry, it tells you why it's not usable — wrong biome, wrong body, wrong conditions.

I hit a specific issue last time I played on a long career save. The checklist was showing some experiments as completed even though I hadn't actually done them. The problem turned out to be a conflict with the Science Recalculated mod, which modifies how experiment results are tallied. The checklist reads the internal science event list, and when Science Recalculated rewrote certain entries, the checklist got confused and marked things double. The fix was just to remove Science Recalculated entirely — the checklist does its own tracking without it, and the recalculator wasn't adding anything useful for my playstyle anyway. One thing beginners miss is that the checklist doesn't track biome conditions by itself. It reports whether an experiment has ever been performed, but if you want to know when you've hit a biome that hasn't been sampled, you need the optional add-on called ScienceChecklist_Biomes. Without that add-on, the biome tab is blank or shows nothing. I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my biome checklist wasn't filling in, and then realized I'd only installed the base mod and not the biome patch. Install both files from the GitHub releases page. The interface lets you filter by action group, body, or experiment type. You can also mark experiments manually, which is useful if you use another mod that already handles tracking. Right-click any entry to force-complete it or clear it. Be careful with the clear function — it only resets the mod's internal counter, not the actual game data. You'll still lose the experiment if you clear it and don't re-perform it.

Performance-wise, the mod runs fine on modern machines, but if you have a ton of plugins modifying science events, the checklist window can take a second or two to open on a cold load. I stopped caring about that after a while. It's not a constant overhead — it just calculates the list once when you open it. If you don't want the mod updating your checklist automatically, there's a config option in the save file that disables auto-tracking. You'd have to manually press a keybind or use the UI to refresh it yourself. Most people leave auto-tracking on, but it's worth knowing the toggle exists if you run into sync issues.