Forcing The Load Order Of Mods

TL;DR: Use lower case zeds!

It is "common knowledge" that you can place one or more letter zeds at the start of a file/directory name to force it to load later. What is not common knowledge is that it matters if you use upper or lower case letters!

Upper case letters sort before lower case ones, so upper case Z sorts before lower case a. In other words, "ZZ" sorts before "Za" - which to a human is not obvious.

Numbers sort before upper case letters, so 9 sorts before upper case A. Hence, "A9" sorts before "AA", and also "10A" sorts before "1A" (as zero sorts before upper case A) - the latter is also not obvious to a human.

The underscore character sorts between the upper and lower case letters. So, "ZZ" sorts before "Z_" which sorts before "Za".

Sorting is performed letter by letter. To a human "ZZZ_this" should sort before "ZZZZ_something" as "ZZZ" is 'shorter' than "ZZZZ", for a computer the important thing is that the fourth letter in each name is compared and "_" sorts after "Z", so "ZZZZ_something" actually sorts before "ZZZ_this".

Compare this to "zzz_this" and "zzzz_something", in this case the fourth letters are "z" and "_", lower case z sorts after underscore, so "zzz_this" sorts before "zzzz_something", as expected.

Moral of the story. Use lower case zeds and you'll get what you expect, but use upper case ZEDS and you won't.

For the technically minded, search "ASCII table"

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