This series has measured what a Workshop mod looks like, what it is called, when it ships, and who publishes it. It has never measured the one number that sits underneath all of those: how many mods the person who made it has already published. We know a creator's first mod predicts almost everything (the debut signal) and that creators who span games hold a disproportionate share of the platform (the portfolio effect). Nobody has asked what happens after number one. So we counted.
Using ModSignal's live dataset — 5,991,048 active Workshop items that carry at least one subscription, published by 1,685,699 distinct creators across 392 game ecosystems, holding 12.47 billion subscriptions — we ranked every item by its position in its creator's catalogue and measured how many of them reached 1,000 subscribers.
The ladder
| Position in the creator's catalogue | Items | Reached 1,000 subscribers |
|---|---|---|
| 1st (debut) | 1,685,685 | 8.59% |
| 2nd | 704,405 | 10.21% |
| 3rd | 437,761 | 11.51% |
| 4th–5th | 555,997 | 12.62% |
| 6th–10th | 711,685 | 14.30% |
| 11th–20th | 612,355 | 16.82% |
| 21st–50th | 599,758 | 20.71% |
| 51st–100th | 293,670 | 25.02% |
| 101st+ | 389,658 | 30.11% |
Nine bands, nine steps, no reversal. A creator's first mod reaches a thousand subscribers 8.59% of the time. Their hundred-and-first reaches it 30.11% of the time — 3.5x, and the line is monotonic at every boundary.
The obvious reading is experience. A creator learns what works, and the later mods are better mods. That reading is wrong, and the rest of this article is about proving it — twice, with the same dataset, ending in a control that turns the whole ladder upside down.
It is not just that veterans publish more
The first thing to rule out is volume. Creators with huge catalogues publish an enormous share of the platform's items, so a high hit rate among them could just be a bigger sample of the same distribution. It isn't. Look at the subscription share against the item share:
| Position band | Items | Share of all items | Mean subs | Median subs | Share of all subscriptions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 1,685,685 | 28.1% | 1,564 | 11 | 21.1% |
| 2nd–5th | 1,698,163 | 28.3% | 1,927 | 22 | 26.2% |
| 6th–20th | 1,324,040 | 22.1% | 2,319 | 41 | 24.6% |
| 21st–50th | 599,758 | 10.0% | 2,640 | 77 | 12.7% |
| 51st–100th | 293,670 | 4.9% | 2,934 | 125 | 6.9% |
| 101st+ | 389,658 | 6.5% | 2,692 | 241 | 8.4% |
Debut mods are 28.1% of all items but 21.1% of all subscriptions — they under-index. The 101st-and-later group is 6.5% of items and 8.4% of subscriptions — it over-indexes by a third. And the median tells the same story in one column: the typical debut mod has 11 subscribers; the typical mod published after a creator's hundredth has 241.
So the ladder is not a sampling artifact. Later catalogue entries are, per mod, more subscribed than earlier ones.
The catalogue-size version of the same effect
Position only exists within a creator, so it excludes the largest group on the platform: the 981,278 creators who have published exactly one mod. Switch the axis from position to catalogue size and they reappear.
| Creator's total catalogue | Creators | Items | Reached 1,000 subs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 mod | 981,278 | 981,278 | 6.72% |
| 2–3 mods | 390,225 | 904,027 | 8.56% |
| 4–10 mods | 222,990 | 1,298,287 | 11.26% |
| 11–30 mods | 69,420 | 1,167,048 | 14.53% |
| 31–100 mods | 18,465 | 919,689 | 20.37% |
| 100+ mods | 3,310 | 720,658 | 29.22% |
A one-mod creator hits 1,000 subscribers 6.72% of the time. A creator with a hundred or more mods hits it 29.22% of the time — 4.3x. The 3,310 creators in that top group are 0.2% of all creators and they hold 727,069 items, 24.8% of every 1,000-subscriber hit on the platform, and 18.5% of all subscriptions.
Before treating that as an argument for volume, note what the same series found in the one-sitting problem: creators who dump mods in batches land worse, not better. Volume is not the mechanism. Something else is.
Four controls, one survivor
Wallpaper Engine. The 3.2-million-item ecosystem breaks every rule in this dataset. Remove it entirely:
| Position band | All games | Excluding Wallpaper Engine |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 8.59% | 7.32% |
| 2nd–5th | 11.33% | 10.51% |
| 6th–20th | 15.46% | 14.35% |
| 21st+ | 24.55% | 21.71% |
The ladder survives, and it is a little steeper without Wallpaper Engine, because the debut rate falls faster than the late rate. Wallpaper Engine is not supplying the effect: late-catalogue mods are 4.12% of the 21+ band against 1.4% of debuts, which is nowhere near enough to move a 3.5x gap.
Single-game creators only. Cross-game portfolios are a different (and documented) effect, so restrict the whole analysis to creators who published in one game: 8.27% → 11.05% → 15.50% → 25.90% across the four position bands. 3.13x, essentially unchanged.
Time. Creators who publish a lot have simply been around longer, so later items have had more time to accumulate. Restrict to the 4,406,664 items whose creator started before 1 June 2024 — every creator in the sample has had at least two years — and the ladder is still there: 10.02% → 12.83% → 17.08% → 25.72%. 2.57x. Age matters (the debut rate rises from 8.59% to 10.02% when you give it time) but it does not explain the ladder.
Per game. Give every ecosystem one vote instead of every mod. Across the 272 games with at least 50 items in both the debut band and the 21+ band, the mean debut rate is 19.04% against 24.39% for late-catalogue mods — and 176 games favour the late band against 94 that favour the debut. The direction repeats in two-thirds of the ecosystems where it can be tested.
That is four independent controls and the ladder holds in all four. Now the fifth.
The control that breaks it
Everything so far compares one creator's mods against other creators' mods, in the same game, at the same age. The strictest test this series uses holds both at once: the same creator, inside the same game. Take the 35,131 creator-and-game pairs where one account published at least 21 items into a single ecosystem, and rank position again:
| Position within the creator's catalogue for that game | Items | Reached 1,000 subs |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 35,131 | 20.73% |
| 2nd–5th | 140,524 | 20.20% |
| 6th–20th | 526,965 | 19.79% |
| 21st+ | 1,185,371 | 25.09% |
Flatten the first three bands — 20.73%, 20.20%, 19.79% — and the ladder is not merely weakened, it is gone, and it is pointing the wrong way. The last band's jump to 25.09% is not experience either; it is a handful of thousand-item accounts flooding the average, and restricting to pairs with 21 to 50 items in the game removes it: 18.96% → 18.48% → 17.85% → 17.40%. Declining at every step.
Hold the creator and the game fixed, and the hundredth mod is worth no more than the first. Slightly less.
What the ladder actually is
The cross-creator ladder is real, and the per-game spread shows how much it varies. It is enormous where an ecosystem rewards accumulation and negative where it does not.
| Ecosystem | Debut rate | 21st+ rate | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Divinity: Original Sin 2 | 9.99% | 66.67% | 5.67x |
| Ravenfield | 11.86% | 66.05% | 4.57x |
| Cities: Skylines | 11.36% | 57.04% | 4.02x |
| Transport Fever 2 | 16.09% | 67.78% | 3.21x |
| Company of Heroes | 51.90% | 24.82% | 0.48x |
| Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord | 51.23% | 30.45% | 0.59x |
| ARK: Survival Evolved | 32.31% | 14.63% | 0.45x |
The pattern is not about skill. It is about what kind of thing gets published into an ecosystem at scale. In Cities: Skylines, House Flipper and Wallpaper Engine, the catalogue is made of asset packs, models, presets and single-purpose objects that are individually cheap to make and individually subscribable. A creator's 400th House Flipper item is not a better mod than their first; it is one more item in a production line, and the production line is what the audience is shopping in.
The proof is in the extreme tail. Consider the two largest catalogues on the platform:
| Creator | Items | Reached 1,000 | Hit rate | Subscriptions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| brittpinkie (House Flipper) | 4,004 | 3,908 | 97.6% | 32.16M |
| Creator 76561199798933624 (Wallpaper Engine) | 3,147 | 3,144 | 99.9% | 10.91M |
| Creator 76561199072373729 (House Flipper) | 4,861 | 2,726 | 56.1% | 8.24M |
| SAC (Dungeon Alchemist) | 4,763 | 366 | 7.7% | 1.57M |
| warblefly41.45 (Galactic Civilizations IV) | 1,998 | 0 | 0.0% | 29,187 |
brittpinkie is a single House Flipper account with 4,004 active items and a 97.6% hit rate. It is not 4,004 experiments that each happened to succeed. It is a catalogue so complete that the catalogue itself is the destination, and every entry inherits its audience. SAC, with a comparable 4,763 items in Dungeon Alchemist, holds a 7.7% hit rate — a third of the platform average for that band — because a 4,763-item catalogue in an ecosystem without that shopping behaviour is just noise. Same size, same game-adjacent structure, opposite outcome. Size is not the cause. Whether the ecosystem treats the catalogue as a shelf is.
The other half of the story: the debut decides the ladder you get
There is a second, sharper split hiding under the ladder, and it is the most useful number in this article.
Split all 1,685,699 creators by whether their first mod reached 1,000 subscribers:
| Creators | Share of creators | Items | Share of items | Share of all subscriptions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Debut hit 1,000 | 144,885 | 8.60% | 915,995 | 15.3% | 79.42% |
| Debut missed | 1,540,803 | 91.40% | 5,074,993 | 84.7% | 20.58% |
8.6% of creators — those whose first mod crossed a thousand subscribers — hold 79.4% of every subscription on the Steam Workshop. This is the debut signal seen from the other end, and it reframes the ladder completely. Run the position analysis inside each half:
| Position | Debut-hit creators | Debut-miss creators |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| 2nd–5th | 56.09% | 4.93% |
| 6th–20th | 55.91% | 7.29% |
| 21st+ | 59.34% | 12.21% |
For a creator whose debut hit, every subsequent mod lands at 56–59% regardless of position — flat, high, and totally insensitive to how many mods they have made. The ladder does not exist for them, because they cleared the bar on mod number one and stay above it.
The entire cross-creator ladder lives in the debut-miss group — the 91.4% of creators who never had a hit first time. And even there it is bounded: 4.93% at position two, 12.21% past position twenty. A creator who missed on debut and has published over twenty mods has, in total, a 12.21% chance per mod of ever reaching a thousand subscribers. The headline 30.11% at the top of the ladder is a mixture of these two populations, and most of it is the debut-hit creators being carried upward as their catalogues grow.
What it means
If you published one mod and it did not reach a thousand subscribers, publishing your twenty-first will not fix it by itself. The measured per-mod odds for the debut-miss population go from 4.93% at position two to 12.21% past position twenty — better, but still a one-in-eight proposition, against a 59.34% plateau for creators who hit on debut. The ladder rewards an established catalogue, and it builds that catalogue on the same ecosystem shopping behaviour that made the first mod sell or not.
If you are choosing an ecosystem, the per-game spread is the real decision. In Cities: Skylines, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Ravenfield a large catalogue converts at 4x to 5.7x the debut rate, because those communities shop shelves. In ARK: Survival Evolved, Dota 2 and Company of Heroes the same behaviour inverts — deep catalogues convert at roughly half the debut rate, and a first mod is the best mod you will ever publish. Publishing strategy is downstream of which of those two economies you are standing in.
And if you are reading a "veterans win" statistic, check what it is really measuring. The 8.59%-to-30.11% ladder is correct, survives four independent controls, and is still misleading on its own — because the same creator in the same game shows no ladder at all (20.73% → 17.40%, declining), and because 79.4% of all subscriptions are held by the 8.6% of creators who hit on their very first mod. The rule this series has now applied six times holds again: a pooled gap that looks like a finding is usually composition wearing a costume, and what is left underneath is smaller, sharper and more useful. Here the residue is not experience. It is the shelf.
Related reading: the debut signal on why a creator's first mod predicts the rest, the portfolio effect on cross-game breadth, the one-hit-wonder economy on how few mods ever reach 100,000 subscribers, the one-subscriber floor on the 654,035 mods that never gained a second install, and the one-sitting problem on why batch-publishing loses.
Method: 5,991,048 Steam Workshop items tracked by ModSignal as of 1 October 2026 across 392 games — every item that is is_active and carries at least one subscription, holding 12,472,080,969 subscriptions, published by 1,685,699 distinct non-null creators. "Position" is the item's 1-based rank in its creator's catalogue ordered by time_created, ties broken by Steam published-file ID for determinism; every item in the sample has a non-null time_created, so no item is dropped from the ladder. "Catalogue size" is a creator's total count of active, subscribed items. "Reached 1,000 subscribers" means subscriptions_current >= 1000 at a single consistent read; it is a point-in-time threshold, not a tracked trajectory. The within-creator-and-game control ranks by position inside the creator's catalogue for one game only, which is why its counts sum differently from the platform-wide ladder; the 21st-plus band there is flagged because it is dominated by accounts with several hundred items in one game, and the 21-to-50 band is reported alongside it to remove that. The per-game test uses unweighted means over games with at least 50 items in both compared bands and reports a sign count as well as the mean. Wallpaper Engine is never excluded from the headline tables and is explicitly excluded in one control, as flagged. The debut split classifies a creator by whether their earliest item crossed the threshold. Counts are from a live production crawl and drift by a few dozen rows between reads.