I have stumbled across a problem that I can not seem to solve. Please bare with me since Im new to modding. I have started modding on top of someone elses mod, the DC interiors mod, and everything has gone fine so far...but what I was trying to do was import food from 2 other mods into my mod, the brahmin dairy mod, and the FDA food mod. What I do is go to: Open>then I select the mods I want to use>put my mod as the active file>then hit ok. And they show up fine in the geck...I can move them around, put them in my space...all signs are good...except when I go in game to test it...they vanish. No sign of them at all. I have messaged the author of the dairy mod but he told me to ask for help on here so thats what Im doing. Please any help you can give is welcomed. Thank you.

ESP's can not reference other ESP's, so those changes you made never got saved.

Any mods you want to have their items accessible in your mod would require them to be ESM's.

Oh...how do you make esm's?

Another way to do it would be to make a copy of the item you are trying to add. Just rename the ID then add it where you want it to appear. That makes it a brand new item which will then appear in your mod when it's saved. That would be the easiest approach.

Oh wow never though of that...ill try it...thanks

You can use .esps as masters in the GECK, but you need to temporarily set their esm flags.

Open up the .esps that you need to use as masters in FO3Edit, expand the mods by clicking the "+" to the left of the file name, select "File Header", and in the view window to the right, right click the empty field to the right of "Record Flags". Select "Edit", say OK to the warning message, then when the flag window pops up click the checkbox for "ESM" so that its got a checkmark in it. Do that for both/all of the .esps, then exit FO3Edit, and allow it to save the changes you made. The GECK will then treat them as masters.

Once you're done making your .esp in the GECK, you should repeat that process, unchecking the .esm flags - it'll prevent the master flags from messing up your load order in FOMM. As long as you don't try opening your plugin in the GECK when those master flags aren't set, everything will work fine.